I saw The Book of Eli the other day and thought it was pretty good. I’ll admit right off the bat that what attracted me to it was the trailers that showed it to be about Denzel Washington kicking ass in a Fallout-style post-apocalyptia, and on that count I was not disappointed. There’s plenty of excellent post-apocalyptic action and a great deal of effort was put into making the world feel realistic.
That said…
** WARNING: ** This next part contains spoilers! Click to read. Although if you don’t, this post will probably seem very short.
Spoilers
The movie’s biggest weakness is, um, its central premise, unhappily enough. The book Eli is carrying around is a bible, and he explains that following the nuclear war that brought about the Fallout world everyone inhabits, there was some type of systematic effort to eradicate Christianity, and miraculously, his is the only bible that escaped the fires. And without bibles, the remaining population has sunk into barbarous, faithless lawlessness.
A coupla issues I notice with this premise:
- It’s ludicrous in the extreme to suggest that America — one of the most religious and Christian of all first-world nations — would actively try to destroy Christianity. I just can’t possibly believe that. Saudi Arabia? Sure. The USA? Pffffft.
- If the nuclear war killed like 95% of humanity (as it certainly seems), what military force was organized enough to go around and blow up the survivors’ bibles?
- Why are bibles necessary to be a Christian? Without the book itself, we’re supposed to believe that people lost the faith? Faith wasn’t created by bibles, bibles were created by people of faith! The movie gets this critical point precisely backwards by suggesting that religion is embodied in fetishistic talismans which are necessary for people to be faithful. Furthermore, even if we can accept this for the sake of argument, there isn’t anybody left alive from that era who’s memorized and recreated it?
Hide spoilers
Okay, so there are some pretty gaping plotholes. But the movie manages to redeem itself to me through the rest of it. Maybe it’s because I’m totally in love with the Fallout universe, but seeing Denzel Washington barter for electricity with salt packets and shoot goggled biker thugs with a sawed-off shotgun just makes me happy inside. The world they all inhabit is indeed pretty derivative of Fallout’s but I don’t care because I love that world, and they manage to infuse it a great deal of detail and life.
So yeah, it’s flawed and you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a bit toward the middle, but I had a good time and didn’t feel ripped off by the outrageous ticket price.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Media, Reviews.
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