The Book of Eli review

When I dish out cash to see a post apocalyptic movie I have exceptions. I want characters, I want a fucking journey that when I leave the theater I'm going to think about and carry with me for a while. And when it's rated R I expect even more. You have the right to pull out all the stops and really create something hard edged and as always badass. Welcome to the gritty future of "The Book of Eli", a movie that's more 'Terminator' without robots than all that silvery shit and CGI in "Terminator Salvation". A movie that belongs aside such post end of the world grit as "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior".

Now something better about the film is that this ain't just a post apocalypse film. It's in fact a samurai picture with a little western thrown in. The Hughes brothers who haven't done a film since 2001's Jack the ripper flick "From Hell" which was stylish, entertaining and flawed due to it's pacing, returns the brothers to the public eye and after this I hope we see more of their films sooner rather than later. They infuse the film with tons of saturated images of the world we knew and characters big and small that are always entertaining and often have more going on then we notice at first glance. But first let me conquer the elephant of the film, the Christianity aspect. What's surprising is that the film doesn't deal with it as God is good and Christians need run the world or anything like that. The film shows the power and importance of religion and the ideas behind it. People can use religion for different reasons and that's something used in the film, but never said in so many words.

Eli's faith is what drives him. This quest west to where he believes the book will be safe. Is it a big Christian alegory like "The Chronicles of Narnia"? Not in any way, sense or form and if you think so then really you don't need to be watching films like this. But now lets shift gears, Denzel is in many ways a badass. Even when playing the types of characters he often plays, he's still a badass that can control any situation. As Eli we see a character unlike most that he's played, a monk and killer with a machete that knows how to handle himself in the wasteland. He has a couple of great long shot fight sequences that'll be remembered. It's brutal and fast paced... not unlike what we see in samurai pictures. Gary Oldman returns to top villainy form as the head of a town. He abuses his wife played by Jennifer Beals and he exploits his step daughter played by Mila Kunis. He's searching for this bible because he too wants it and while the trailers may make you think he's simply out to use it for evil, it's not quite so cut and dry.

He does want the people to be civilized and he knows the power that those words can have over the people. There is more to it, but I don't want to spoil the whole scope of the picture. And it really is a big scoped film that creates a world and the people within it. It's not just a bunch of destroyed cities and desert and action set pieces. There's a system at work with the few civil minded people existing in the world and it works for them. As an action picture Hughes brothers know what works and what works is when you have everything encompassed into a single frame. The sequences in which Kunis tosses a grenade down the road and it blows an armored car to pieces. Instead of cutting the scene to pieces they do two simple shots and both include the actors, the explosion and the pieces landing around them. The same goes for the fight scenes and several of the films shoot outs, the longer the shot goes on the more engrossing the action becomes. The best of the best action filmmakers know this.

So with all my love of "The Book of Eli" not everybody's gonna like it. People who can't figure out the real religious parts of the movie and realize some of the undertones and questions it attempts to raise won't like it because they think it's trying to convert them (which I'd love to hear them convince me of) or they find that any religious aspect in any film cheesy (which I'll defend here till I'm out of breath). It's an action movie that actually attempts to make you think about society and what religion can do to humanity. It's also a genre picture in the best sort of way. It pays it's tiny homages throughout the film and in different ways and is still very original and endlessly entertaining. If you like films like "Zatoichi", "A Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More" or the "Mad Max" films then yes this is right up your alley. If not, well there's plenty of copies of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" to go around.