The Book of Eli presents an interesting case for the post-apocalyptic film -- a microgenre most recently bolstered by films like Children of Men, I Am Legend and The Road -- as the re-birth of the western, but beyond that it's pretty dumb. The latter film hews most closely to The Book of Eli (directed by the Hughes brothers, their first film after a nine-year hiatus) in structure, theme and palette: rather than using the distancing tropes of science fiction to envision a blighted future, both treat a ravaged United States like a new and yet recognizable frontier.
The dystopian setting now seems closer to our hearts and minds than that of the Western, which has all but ceased to fire the American imagination, although the story is essentially the same: a stranger traveling across a dangerous and unforgiving landscape enters a small town and must save himself and at least one of its inhabitants from the evil brewing there. Here, that traveler is named Eli and played by old poker face Denzel Washington in a role that has a faint but occasionally pointed resemblance to Clint Eastwood's Preacher in Pale Rider. In one scene that directly echoes Rider, Eli looks down on a group of godless men as they encircle and then begin to sexually attack a young woman; Eli hesitates, as Preacher did, telling himself the attack is not his concern. The reaction doesn't make much sense here, with Eli having already demonstrated his Bourne-worthy combat skills, although I imagine it's meant to suggest a man struggling with the obligations of faith and the instincts of self-preservation. The film's muddled theme -- religion (and specifically Christianity) is posited as both the cause of and the solution to all of humanity's problems -- necessitates several such uneducated guesses.
Was it God's wrath that brought "the flash" upon the United States? As with The Road, the "why" is implied to be beside the point, although later in the film "the book" Eli carries around with him is suggested as the reason for Earth's destruction. As a result they were all rounded up and burned, although a few copies of O Magazine and The Da Vinci Code managed to survive. Thirty-one years after the flash, what's left of the population is post-literate, post-religion, and half-blind. We meet Eli through an opening "day in the life" sequence that finds him bagging a stringy cat for dinner and listening to some Al Green on, like, a first generation iPod. The bleached out landscape is of the seared, desert-like variety you will recognize from the aforementioned Road, The Road Warrior, and B.C. cartoons, which often featured roads. Instead of heading east, like Viggo and that little kid, however, Eli is heading west, if for equally inscrutable reasons.
Along the way Eli meets bad people -- people who eat people -- but displays an infallibility in combat that we are meant to assume approaches the divine. I guess we're also meant to assume Eli stopped reading his King James Bible before pacifism made its big, manger-rocking debut. There are several brutal fight sequences in the film -- the first one shot in a comic book silhouette -- and they generally go like this: Eli smells trouble, Eli is surrounded by terrifying goons, Eli quotes scripture and kick-eth ass.
Entering a one-street town to find water and juice up some of his mysterious equipment, Eli has typically hostile (and then grudgingly respectful) interactions with a shopkeeper (played by cinema's favorite pinch-hitter, Tom Waits) and the bartender at the saloon/whorehouse owned by a guy named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). When Eli decimates Carnegie's clientele after a minor misunderstanding, the two men have a brief, snack-sized act-off in the upstairs quarters: ham on white bread. Actually, from that scene comes the film's first and most interesting notion, one that the Hughes and first-time scriptwriter Gary Whitta seem to have struck on like a broken clock: "As old as we are," Carnegie says, "people like you and me, we're the future." They remember the old world and its lessons, they are literate and lead inner lives still fueled, if only in memory, by something other than survival instincts. They are relics but like the wet-naps now traded like gold coins, they -- and not the youth -- have become precious to reviving something resembling the learned condition of civilization. The line evaporates almost as quickly as it is uttered, however, and Carnegie, who is obsessed with finding a bible so he can use it to control the masses, is spouting things like, "It's not a book, it's a weapon aimed at the minds and the hearts of the desperate."
Everyone wears sunglasses or goggles in the sun, which is bad news for Washington, whose chronic impassivity didn't really need any help, but great for Mila Kunis -- playing the enslaved step-daughter of Carnegie -- who gets to top off her boho chic ensembles with some bitching aviators. The Hughes add self-conscious mood and energy here and there (they shot with RED digital cameras), by sometimes speeding up the film and sometimes slowing it down; occasionally they send it zooming into or out of an impossible opening. The soundtrack is strictly sci-fi, and arty, Kubrickian sci-fi at that: lots of big, flatulent blasts of synth and horns. It amounts to so much decoration, an attempt to trim a story that fails to move because it never offers a clear set of terms.