Spoiler Warning: it’s virtually impossible to talk about Eli without talking about the ‘secret’ of “the book” – that is, what book it is. Not to worry, however: it’s all but spray-painted on the lens in the first fifteen minutes, and specifically confirmed in terribly awkward exposition before the first half hour. Besdies, there are plenty of other “twists” at the end that don’t have to be exposed here, if ‘twists’ really matter that much to you. So if you want to know nothing, STOP HERE. Otherwise …
One to Go
The ‘secret’ of the Book is, in fact, so painfully cliché’d and obvious that you really don’t want it to be true. You keep thinking that it can’t be that simple or that obvious; you keep hoping it will actually be The Joy of French Cooking or a big gray book titled To Serve Man. But no. It really is just the Holy Bible. That’s it. Just as you suspected. The only twist: apparently this is the very last copy of the Bible on the whole planet, though it is only thirty years into our future. It seems everyone in the world who survived “The War” and “The Flash” three decades back crawled up out of their shelters shortly after the global disaster, and rather than go find food or build new communities or plant a few crops in the wasteland, they decided instead to find and destroy every single copy of the King James Bible (and, we must assume, Good News for Modern Man and The New Bible and all the other iterations) in a worldwide fit of pique.
Why is Eli (Denzel Washington) so dedicated to this magic book? Because shortly after he crawled up out of the ground, Eli had a vision from God that guided him to the one and only remaining copy of ‘The Book’ (there is a highly manipulative and totally inexplicable refusal to say the word ‘Bible,’ even after the ‘secret’ is no secret at all). And God also told him to take it West, ever West, where it would be safe and he would be protected. So he’s been walking west ever since. For thirty years.
Shortly after our extremely slowly paced story begins, Eli wanders into a tiny, wrecked town in the middle of nowhere (though apparently everywhere is nowhere now), where the leader of the town (Gary Oldman – think ?? from Deadwood without the cussing, and with dirt and rusty metal instead of mud and rotting wood) is equally obsessed with The Book and getting a copy. Why? Because, “it’s not a book,” he bellows – Oldman bellow a lot in this movie, “it’s a WEAPON!” If he has the book, people will listen to him. They will do what he says. He will find the words to make people follow him and he will take over the world – or at least a couple more villages. So he’s sending out rape-gangs and bounty hunters everywhere, anywhere their motorcycles and armored SUVs can carry them, to find the very book that Eli is bringing into town at this very moment.
There is a moment about thirty minutes into the film when the simplest and most logical act would have ended the story then and there. (i.e., how about you search the guy who just killed most of your elite bullyboys in the local saloon for weapons and other interesting stuff before you lock him up for the night?) But that doesn’t happen – as so many illogical and inexplicable things happen and don’t happen in Eli. Instead, we spend the next hour or so watching Eli walk west while Carnegie and his thugs try and stop him, with suspiciously healthy and well-dressed Salana (Mila Kunis) helping him out in the patent-pending Plucky Sidekick Role.
Maybe if that was all it tried to be – a kind of Mad Max Goes West – it wouldn’t have been so bad. But Eli insists on having a message as well, and that presents a host of problems. Among them: (a) We’ve already seen Mad Max, (b) it’s filmed and cut at about half-speed compared to your normal action/adventure flick or almost any film about The End of the World As We Know It And Its Aftermath, and (c) the uncomfortably overly evangelical message at the center of the movie makes absolutely no sense at all.
Other than that … it’s a winner.
Imagine There’s No Country …
The science that The Book of Eli tramples upon is not physics or biology, for a change (though the exactly relationship between ‘The War’ and ‘The Flash’ and the apparent loss of the ozone layer – everyone has to wear sunglasses outside, even blind people -- is never really explained). The real victim here is anthropology. Eli ‘predicts’ the behavior of humans after a disastrous war – long after the war, a couple generations on – in a way that is inconsistent with any historical or anthropological event ever, in the known history of the planet, and replaces it with a vision that is both absurd and disturbingly bitter.
We are told repeatedly that the catastrophe that led to TEOTWAWKI happened thirty years ago; none of the young adults remember “the world before” at all, and the number of adults who do is low and getting lower. Yet the people of Carnegie’s nameless little desert town still have the rusting hulks of automobiles on Main Street, and ragged children playing in rubble that nobody’s bothered to clean up … and they’ve left it there for at least three decades.
The level of ‘civilization’ we see here simply defies human reality or historical precedent. There is little apparent commerce, no real governance, no agriculture, no adaptive technology despite the extreme weather and huge need, no education (pretty much everyone under 30 is illiterate, we are told), no food-gathering or distribution system, no health care despite many injured and damaged people – not even witch-doctors – no art, no storytelling, no rebirth of simple craftsmanship (you’d think, for instance, a self-taught bowmaker would do great business post-apocalyptically speaking), and not even any music of the saw-and-gut-bucket variety. The living people fall into two categories -- victims and thugs – and the thugs rule the world, hands down and asses up. They exert their power through an apparently unchallenged, homicidal control over the water – more valuable than gold in this new, endless desert-world. Yet they still somehow seem to have gasoline, and though there are virtually no animals left except buzzards and the occasional cat, people seem less concerned about eating that drinking.
All of this – absent the “Bible” thing – might be acceptable in the residents of a shell-shocked village a month or even a year after a global catastrophe. But not thirty years. Some semblance of a real civilization would have to grow here, even a twisted and diseased one (as in, for instance, Bartertown in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). But ‘refugee status’ is not a permanent social state of being; we have seen that even in the most horrible circumstances, like Somalia or Caucescu’s Czhechoslovakia or Pol Pot’s Cambodia after their respective descents into chaos. It seems equally absurd that there would be no attempt to even try and make this devastated world a more livable place, through cleverness or simply the recapture of the ‘lost’ technologies. But the people of Eli have descended to a kind of mute savagery that’s closer to Morlocks without the Eloi than it is to humanity, and there’s no real explanation as to why we have fallen so far so fast, and why there isn’t even the failed attempt at recovery.
This isn’t a transplanted town of the Old West, despite the genre-specific similarities. This is civilization seen as an eternal refugee camp, filled with people who are more like Morlocks than humans, with all the filth and hopelessness that implies.
…And No Religion, Too
But the biggest implausibility centers around The Book itself. Not just that every single copy of the world’s most-read, most-printed, most-memorized book has been completely and utterly lost in thirty years’ time – that alone is more than a little ridiculous. It’s the idea, perpetrated in a number of ways throughout the film, that the very idea of religion – apparently the idea of God him/herself – has been lost and forgotten in a few short years. Its best (or worst) illustration is embodied in one particularly embarrassing scene – one that evoked audible groans from the crowd of critics at a recent screening – when Mila Kunis’ character tries to show her astonished mother the previously undreamt of, brand new idea of “saying grace” that Eli taught her the night before, implying that even the most basic notion of prayer seems to have been forgotten. Oldman’s bully-boy bossman has to tell her how to end this nameless ‘thing’ she’s learned from Eli. “Amen,” he grumbles. “The word you’re looking for is Amen.” As if even than fundamental idea – one absolutely essential and universal to virtually any society during its darkest times – has been burned out of the human mind.
This isn’t just rickety world-building, done simply to prove a point or make a metaphor (though it’s that as well). This is also bad science -- in this case anthropology rather than physics or biochemistry.
Come on, people: Every society, at every level of development has its God or Gods; all of them have some sort of prayer or petitioning process, some means to communicate with their deities. To presuppose that Americans – or any human society, really – would lose the fundamental notion of God and Religion, and would do it in a single thirty-year span, is just too much to accept.
And then there’s the religious notion that empowers Eli’s quest – the idea that the Book – the book itself, not the messages it carries – has some magical, talismanic property. Without the presence, the magical power, of the King James Bible, the movie tells us, people have descended into post-literate barbarism; we’re told that humans will begin to act human again only with the resurrection of the Bible itself – and even then, only if it’s returned to the ‘right’ hands; otherwise this magic book will become a weapon of mass destruction instead of salvation.
The ideas that are memorialized in the Bible are barely acknowledged here, much less discussed, beyond the recitation of a few of its most painfully obvious verses and a misremembrance of the Golden Rule. But the book, the book, is of supreme importance, worth nearly endless bloodshed to move to its true destination … which is really nothing more than a return to the hands of a slightly less revolting but no less isolated elite.
What’s more, it’s worth noting that Denzel’s Eli is not, by any stretch, a Christian or a hero – not even one of those reluctant-hero types. He does not preach the Bible’s teachings – he can’t even bear to say the name of the book aloud until the last ten minutes of the movie, and you won’t hear the name of “Jesus” at all in Eli -- not once. He does not behave like Jesus, either; quite the contrary, he ignores those in need when he encounters them on the road; he keeps even the very existence of the Word to himself, constantly denying he even has the book at all, and he evades or kills anyone who gets in his way as he continues his relentless vision quest. If there is an underlying message about religion in this film, the message is that religion is an amoral force, one that can be used for good or evil, without any intrinsic positive value at all. That, and the idea that humans, left to their own devices, are just No Damn Good; that given half a chance (and no magic Bibles to stop it), we will sink into grimy barbarism and self-destruction, up to and including cannibalism, in the space of a single generation.
Not exactly a message of hope.
The plot itself has some significant difficulties that really don’t matter in the long run, and the implicit geography of the post apocalyptic world is just plain wrong. Worst of all, the last fifteen minutes of the movie, in which the Book’s ultimate fate is revealed and all the twists begin to explode like land mines planted along the way, is almost laughably problematic. But there is a visual power in Eli, and throughout we are clearly in the hands of some very talented actors that can make us keep watching no matter what we might be thinking.
Still … bottom line? You’ll get a better post-apocalyptic pop from The Road, Mad Max, A Canticle for Leibowitz, or even Fallout 3 than you’ll get from The Book of Eli.
Proceed at your own risk.
