THE BOOK OF ELI review: people bad, Bible good

THE BOOK OF ELI review: people bad, Bible good

Apr 20

I was prepared, as I walked into an entirely empty cinema last night, to loathe The Book Of Eli. Movies based on Christian mythology are often boring, and sometimes offensive attempts at proselytising (Constantine, Gabriel, The End Of Days, The Passion Of The Christ), but as the screen flickered to life and the film got underway my opinion changed — slowly. Very slowly, as the film isn’t hurried, and suffers from an appallingly bad opening; but by the end I was convinced (er, converted?). The Book Of Eli is not a bad film.

The Bad:

- The unforgivably boring first half: The whole first hour of the film fails to introduce any worthwhile exposition. The characters, the setting, the nature of the disaster — everything remains ambiguous. This hurt the experience for me, until things started to be explained, deep in the second act, which was a bit too late for my patience.

- The hook: The film opens with Denzel Washington shooting a cat with a two-foot arrow bolt. If there’s one way that’s sure not to build empathy with your main character, it’s killing a poor old kitty in cold blood. And then in the next scene Denzel feeds some of the cat’s meat to a mouse — if you’re that desperate for food, kill the mouse, you idiot! Not sure why this bugged me, on reflection. Bad first impressions, I guess.

- Denzel Washington’s Jedi-like proficiency with any weapon: This was distracting, again, only for the first half, but distracting it is. The film’s slack pace is propped up by three jaw-dropping set-pieces, spaced evenly throughout, but the first of these loses all impact because it’s confusing: does Denzel really have god on his side or is he just really good with blades and guns? Lack of character development exacerbates this problem.

- Mila Kunis.

- The drab cinematography and grading: Sure, over-exposure helps to sell the fact that the ozone layer is gone, but some sky-shots are tinged green — because, you know, everyone learned from the Simpsons that anything remotely nuclear is green, right?

- Blind leading the blind: The blind woman in this film doesn’t quite come off as completely blind. I don’t know why, but her constantly roving eyes confused me a little.

- People bad, Bible good: It distracted my rational mind that the film’s MacGuffin, ostensibly a weapon to enforce peace, is actually a tome that endorses rape, torture, slavery, genocide, infanticide, and all that other groovy stuff. You have to grant the film a Christian point of view for it to work, and I only did this grudgingly.

The Good:

- Performances: Denzel Washington sleepwalks straight through to the third act, but when he wakes up, you can feel the difference. Without going into detail, his character changes and he’s faced with tough choices, and you can see on his face just how tought they are. Gary Oldman’s here as well, and if anyone in the world could have nailed the greasy Wild West mayor / gang boss combo with anything approaching skill or reverence, it’s him. Bravo.

- Cameos: I don’t want to spoil the cameos, because they’re all in the back end of the film, but seeing and hearing these familiar faces gives the film a kind of kick I didn’t expect them to.

- Minimalistic music: Some of the music was a bit heavy-handed, but on the whole I found it appropriately elegant. Except for the pop music that plays in the film — but that’s intentionally jarring, of course.

- Action scenes: It’s nice to see that someone other than me not only saw Children Of Men, but enjoyed it. Here we have an action scene that’s told mostly in a single long-take shot; it’s complex, visceral and somehow manages to work in the context of the film (unlike the similar scene in Terminator Salvation, which just came off as a cheap knock-off). I was seriously ready to give this film a 40 until that scene (and the rest of the third act) came along.

- The third act: I don’t know if it was on purpose, but everything in the film seemed to be low-key and a little bit dull, until the third act, where everything managed to kick off. The action picked up, the characters came together a bit better, and the story took some very interesting turns. If some kind of hook could have been established back in the first act hinting at this, I would’ve sat through the first hour a lot happier.

- Revelations: This film ends with a twist, but a “twist” in the best sense of the word. Instead of a cheap, just-for-shocks ending (like in Saw), we get a patient shot that sort of ends with a little “Oh, by the way, did you know this?” And then your mind flips out and goes back over the entire film to see if it’s true — and by god, it is. The twist completely alters your perception of the film but doesn’t make you feel like the rug’s just been pulled out from under you. Great twist.

- Symbolism?: Cats and eyes play an important part in Eli‘s world, and you don’t really realise until the end how much symbolism was sprinkled through the film. Whether or not it was intentional requires a second viewing, and I don’t know if I can be bothered doing that right now.

Post-nuclear wastelands appear to be everyone’s playground these days. From games like Fallout 3, Metro 2033, and Borderlands, to recent movies like The Road and The Book Of Eli, it seems that pop culture is trying to tell us something. So where does Eli fit into all this? Is it better, in fact, than The Road? In my opinion, yes, it is better, but by a small margin. While it eschews the realism and humanism of the more artfully-minded The Road, Eli manages to provide a better conclusion and remains a more cathartic experience.

The film, directed by the “Hughes brothers,” feels like it could’ve done with a bit more assurance and control, especially in the opening passages. But it builds into such a satisfying climax that I can’t help but feel that this movie was actually rather good. I can tell you that a great many people will be bored by the opening scenes, with nothing but a dead cat and some soul music to live on, but I imagine that some audiences, especially Christians, will get even more out of the film than I did, for reasons I won’t go into here (for fear of spoilers). If you do manage to stick with it, though, I think there’s something for everyone in The Book Of Eli.

The Book Of Eli score

71/100