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FILM REVIEW: Apocalyptic Eli suffers directorial flaws Ken Lowery, Jan 29, 2010
WARNER BROS. PHOTO
Eli (Denzel Washington) navigates a post-apocalyptic wasteland while protecting a sacred book in The Book of Eli.
The Book of Eli Rated R for some brutal violence and language
By Ken Lowery Staff Writer
Few major motion pictures are openly biblical. Many often draw on biblical allusions (from familiar biblical story arcs to simply naming a villain “Kane”), but more often than not those allusions are a shortcut to gravitas. The Book of Eli is rare, then, in its use of marquee names (Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman) and modern action-movie techniques to tell a story that would fit comfortably among the Old Testament prophets. More or less.
Mr. Washington is Eli, a man who’s been trekking across a post-apocalyptic America for the last 30 years. He carries with him a book—clearly the Bible, though the characters are awfully coy about naming it outright—and also a mission: to deliver the Bible somewhere “West.” More he will not say.
Eli is not without his defenses, and that’s good: Many of the people still walking the earth after the final war and a catastrophic “flash” have turned to thievery to survive, and would-be dictators have set up fiefdoms in bombed-out towns where their word is law.
Eli visits one such town ruled by Carnegie (Mr. Oldman), a civilized man who wants the one book he thinks will help him expand his empire outward: the very same book Eli has taken as his charge. We learn that in the years after the final war, survivors rounded up and burned every holy book they could find, as they blamed those books for bringing about the catastrophe. Eli may very well have the last complete Bible in existence. Carnegie sees in the Bible a tool for control; Eli views it as a means for liberation.
It’s hard to imagine a scant few survivors destroying the most prolifically published book on Earth, but if The Book of Eli makes a few leaps in logic to get its point across, so be it. It’s clear from the beginning that something may be protecting Eli. Skilled gunmen miss easy shots and others wither under his stare, as if sensing the importance of his mission. Skating the line between pragmatic “realism” (as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie defines it) and a touch of something miraculous is one of the things The Book of Eli does well.
But it is a troubled movie. Anyone familiar with the works of the Hughes brothers (From Hell) knows their pitfalls: obsession with style over substance, haphazard pacing and good premises sullied or made moot by those flaws. The Book of Eli, sadly, is no different.
Consider the landscape itself, largely made up of arid desert pockmarked by the occasional massive crater, isolated farmhouse or overturned vehicle. Even Carnegie’s town looks like little more than a small outcropping of rocks lost in hardpan desert. At first this dramatic isolation is effective, dwarfing Eli in a sea of shifting sand and dead landmarks. Eli’s world is not only hostile, but seems an active refutation of his quest. How can one man and one book do anything of significance in such a lifeless place?
But that arid landscape, lingered over by many, many establishing shots and sweeps, soon becomes something of a liability. When Eli walks into Carnegie’s town we’re given reference points, spatial relationships, a sense of the passage of time. But once he leaves again—with Carnegie and his men hot on his heels—the movie becomes as formless and endless as the desert itself.
How far has Eli (and his new companion, a runaway from Carnegie’s town played by Mila Kunis) gone? Where is he in relation to anything else? How much time has passed? Questions like these kill what momentum The Book of Eli builds from its infrequent action sequences and occasionally very good dialogue exchanges.
This would be less of a problem if Eli wasn’t so taciturn, but as with everyone else who encounters him, he keeps the audience at arm’s length. His frustrating single-mindedness—which, granted, he acknowledges, and which makes him not unlike a few Old Testament prophets—does not make for compelling cinema. Mr. Washington has considerable charisma, but that can only take Eli so far.
The Book of Eli has at its core noble goals and statements: that religion is as much a unifier of humanity as it is a divider, that faith can guide the humble to greatness, and that ambitious science-fiction settings and concepts can be used to tell ancient and still-relevant stories. But these are strong statements, and they need a stronger movie to say them well.
WARNER BROS. PHOTO
Eli visits one such town ruled by Carnegie (Mr. Oldman), a civilized man who wants the one book he thinks will help him expand his empire outward: the very same book Eli has taken as his charge. We learn that in the years after the final war, survivors rounded up and burned every holy book they could find, as they blamed those books for bringing about the catastrophe. Eli may very well have the last complete Bible in existence. Carnegie sees in the Bible a tool for control; Eli views it as a means for liberation. 
