The Book of Eli

Post-apocalyptic fiction has grown in recent years to be a bit of a cult industry, ranging from the resurgence of the zombie film (28 Days Later, Zac Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake) to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road. The Book of Eli is very much riding on the wave of this phenomenon, representing a pop culture zeitgeist through a combination of tropes and styles such as sci-fi, comic books, the samurai film, westerns, and an all-pervading sense of post-20th century armageddon. The result is one heck of a good-looking film, a constructed monument to all that's cool amongst film geek, and a fun exercise in tightly controlled stylism.

Eli (Denzel Washington) is a prophet for a new age, walking the land armed only with a Bible and a samurai sword. It's around 2050, and the world has gone to shit thanks to a nuclear apocalypse. America is a land of lawlessness barely kept afloat by a brutral bartering system. We know that this world is screwed within the first few minutes because the hero has to kill and eat a scrawny, hairless cat. But we also know that this guy is essentially a good man because he shares this food with a hungry rat. Eli travels by foot across the American mid-west, hoping to get to the last remnants of reasonable civilisation so that he can deliver what is most likely the world's last Bible. During this journey he crosses paths with a self-made warlord named Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who recognises the value of the Bible as a weapon to rule the weak and therefore covets it. Eli isn't going to let his Bible fall into the wrong hands though, and he's prepared to fight quite valiantly for what he believes in.

As I mentioned, the film has a really great look to it. The cinematography is washed-out but incredibly sharp, giving the film a dustbound gothic look. The directors (the Hughes brothers) draw upon the influence of samurai, western and wushu films to give their action-adventure a unique but classical look - lots of stark images of silhouettes fighting and other meaningfully-blocked shots. A character even whistles Ennio Morricone's Ecstasy of Gold at point, directly referencing Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western character, the man with no name. Washington's Eli is like the angelic counterpart to Eastwood's anti-hero, a worn down holy man with a mean arm for swordfighting. It's also nice to see Gary Oldman playing a villain that isn't so cartoonish for once (see True Romance, Lost in Space and The Fifth Element for what I mean), he's starting to seem like the kind of actor who just gets exponentially better with age.

I think that whilst The Book of Eli is quite bleak it's not without heart, so it's a film that will really pull you in and hold your interest. I don't really understand the mixed reviews this film got - sure, it's a fairly familiar depiction of the apocalypse, but it's also really well done. Washington's character and mission bring it to life in a new way by giving a depressing genre a new sense of hope and temperence. There's exciting and uncliched action set pieces, some carefully conceived characters, and a fairly successful attempt at engineering a confident and self-sufficient mythology. Also, watch out for some great twists towards the end as well, they're a real doozy.

DIRECTOR: The Hughes Brothers
WRITER/SOURCE: Gary Whitta
KEY ACTORS: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Beals, Ray Stevenson, Michael Gambon, Tom Waits

RELATED TEXTS
- The previous film made by the Hughes Brothers was the graphic novel-inspired From Hell.
- Other post-apocalyptic films that came out around the same time as this film: The Road and I Am Legend.
- See also: Mad Max and Damnation Alley, two influential '70s films in the post-apocalyptic genre.