The Homework Never Ends Marking off my legacy of worldly deeds

Review: The Book of Eli (2010)

The kind of disclaimer Movie Bob should have given: I'm a Christian. This story involves the Bible as a central plot element. This is, I think, important enough to mention.

Name a novel or fiction series that you consider to be 'Christian Lit'.

Alright, you just thought of at least one of these and its resultant pains:

• Left Behind - Badly written, preachy, and assuming a fringe theology.
• Narnia or The Lord of the Rings - Cool story, but the allegory is either too obvious and preachy or hidden too deep to be found without wide interpretation.
• The Last Sin-Eater and other colonial period romances - Hard to get into unless you're an old lady or interested in the setting. Formulaic.
• Veggie Tales - Aimed at children.

If you're 99 out of 100 people, you hear 'Christian Lit' and bristle, whether or not you're a Christian. Even if you would really enjoy reading a story about fellow Christians, you can't find any good ones.

I want you to take that assumed frustration and stack it all up and tie it in a neat little bundle and burn it. And then I want you to go see The Book of Eli.

To backtrack a little: The setting is awesome when it needs to be. The first three or four scenes were like a quiet, abused old man staring at me silently until I was cowed into submissive open-mindedness by the sheer force of his tragedy. The wide, panning shots of gorgeously destroyed landscapes took my breath away. Atmosphere was taken care of first.

The characters were one-note. Therefore, the titular character is half 'mysterious guru', half 'wandering samurai'. The villain wants to use Scriptures to control people. The lead lady is hot but doesn't really do anything except give the main character someone to whom he can (rarely) exposit.

The acting is pretty superb on all sides. I really have no complaints.

The action is rare, and that's welcome. Being a tropes-knowledgeable person, I dreaded some points in the story because I thought there would be more and more battle scenes. However, the four or so fights in the movie (five if you count the Faux Action Girl's one moment of awesome) are short, to the point, sometimes hilarious, and far-between.

The sound work is incredible. Music is only used when appropriate and believable; otherwise, atmospheric noise reminiscent of Akira Yamaoka is used instead.

Finally, if you're looking for an incredible, original explanation for the apocalypse pre-dating the story, you'll be disappointed. It's barely hinted at.

Some of that might have sounded negative, but here's the great part: The seemingly-negative things I mentioned work toward creating an incredible story.

This is, through and through, an allegory. People used to write them, you know. There was one called A Pilgrim's Progress, in which characters and places were usually referred to as what they represented, i.e. Vanity Fair, in which vain people hold an allegorical fair. This isn't a dime novel; it's a teaching tool.

Your foremost question is most likely, "Is The Book of Eli preachy?" No. Never. Not at all. Once, the main character (reluctantly) explains his religious experience to the Faux Action Girl. At another point, the villain spouts some garbage at Eli in an attempt to get him to hand over The Book. That's it. It's understated, yet sets up a powerful background for the entire story.

I used to admire Movie Bob, but as you can tell if you watched his review (linked in the disclaimer above), he hated this movie, and it's obvious why. Hint: It's the only thing he harps on during the entire review, other than a throwaway comment about it being 'unoriginal' (this coming from the person who praised 2012 for 'staying true to its genre' and 'not trying to take the horses out of the Western').  The moment he heard 'Bible', he was turned off; the rest of the movie was just a farce to him. He didn't see the epic and yet human story of the recovery of something "we used to throw away and that we now kill each other for"; he saw preachiness and shoddy plot ideas where there was some real treasure.

Post-apocalyptic stories have been done, and one or two have even been done better (though the opening scenes of The Book of Eli were more powerful than anything else I've seen in the past while). But nothing I've seen has even tried to cover the terrible loss of religion, supposedly a luxury, in the face of the apocalypse.

On a personal note, I felt inspired. See, a long time back, I outlined a screenplay (before I figured out that novels are my only comfortable form) called Wogs, in which a group of rebels fight a Scientology-esque cult in a post-apocalyptic future. It'll be on my mind quite a bit during the next few days as I digest The Book of Eli.