The Book of Eli (2010)

Denzel Washington turns a cat into a chapstick, Mila Kunis goes from meek to mayhem in about 60 seconds flat, and Gary Oldman yells a lot. Welcome to the apocalypse, Hughes Brothers style!

The Book of Eli is a 2010 post-apocalyptic thriller directed by the Hughes Brothers and starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman and Mila Kunis.

Before I get into my favourite moments in The Book of Eli, let me just reiterate a point about this blog – the warning about spoilers on the home page ain’t no joke. My posts can only loosely be called ‘reviews’, they're basically just me harping on about films I love or films I hate, so discussing plot twists and endings is sort of the par for the course.

I mention this because I’m going to dish out a whopping great spoiler for this film in the first paragraph of the review, and it’s one of the best plot twists of all time. Yeah, that’s right, of…all…time. So I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who has not seen the film, because it’s best experienced cold. If you haven’t seen The Book of Eli, do so before reading on. You have been warned.

Okay, let’s get into it.

My favourite moment in this film is right at the start. It’s where Eli (Denzel Washington) takes refuge in a ruined house and settles in for the night. Before he goes to sleep he takes out his bible and opens it. As he does so, he closes his eyes and begins silently mouthing the words. He does this, because he’s blind. The bible is in braille, but regardless, he’s read it so many times he’s memorised it anyway.

The 'he was blind the whole time' twist is revealed much later, but, as in films like The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, it’s signposted numerous times throughout the film. And like The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, directors the Hughes Brothers deliberately filmed The Book of Eli in a way that makes Eli’s blindness ambiguous enough as to have you question it, even after the film is over, and demanding a second viewing just to figure it out and pick up on all the clues.

My favourite clue to his blindness is when he recognises the sound of a motorcycle he has heard before, and knows a band of thugs is in the same town as him. It's a beautifully subtle moment, all he does is kind of turn his head a little. It's easily missed the first time through, like a lot of the clues are. It’s brilliantly done.

We’ve seen him earlier, killing a cat for food. While in the house cooking the cat, he feeds a rat sharing the house with him. It’s the first indication of Eli’s character. Instead of killing the rat he shares some of his food with it. He doesn't just kill wantonly - the cat was emaciated and gaunt and probably close to death anyway. The reason he doesn’t kill the rat is he doesn’t prey on the weak. This is illustrated again shortly afterwards when he comes across a woman in the wasteland. He doesn’t steal her water, even though she offers it to him and he’s clearly running low on his own supply. He's just dispatched the band of lowlifes she was with, and could clearly just kill her as well, but he doesn't. He knows he’s a badass and holds the power of life and death over some of the people and creatures around him, but he chooses to use that power wisely.

The counterpoint to this is the villain of the piece, played of course by Gary Oldman. Seriously, what do casting directors do when auditioning films like this? I swear they keep Gary Oldman’s agent on speed dial. ‘So, who’s playing the lead?’ ‘Who cares, we got Gary!’ He plays the wannabe dictator of a makeshift settlement, and when we first meet him he’s reading a biography of Mussolini. While I love villains who genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, it’s also hilarious when a bad guy just knows he’s a bad guy. And there isn't an actor alive who can yell like Gary Oldman.

Oldman’s character wants a bible because he’s deluded enough to believe that standing on a pulpit and spouting ideology will help him control people and thus expand his little post-apocalyptic paradise (hence the Mussolini reference). So when he finds out the mysterious stranger recently arrived in his settlement is carrying a bible, it's game on.

Washington and Oldman represent two sides of the same coin. There are those who embrace organised religion because their intentions are truly altruistic, and then there are those who would seek to use it to further their own aims, and as a method of control. Eli is taking the bible across the country to a settlement the opposite of Oldman’s – a place seeking to preserve knowledge and start again. Oldman just wants to expand his empire.

The female lead is Solara (Mila Kunis), an illiterate girl in Oldman’s settlement. She’s fascinated with the message contained in the book – that of a world far different from what she knows. The fact that she can’t read is key. Oldman sends gangs out into the wastes to gather books in a relentless search for THE book, but they can’t read either. One of them even remarks that it would be far easier to find this one book if the guys looking for it could actually read. But instead of teaching them, he orders the books they find destroyed. Like any dictator, his power relies on mercilessly keeping people dependent on him.

The moments of humour in the film are also brilliantly done. My favourite is when Washington and Kunis take refuge in an isolated farmhouse with an old couple. The couple proudly display a working phonograph and put on a record, music they describe as relaxing and a respite from the savage world around them. You’re expecting some sweeping opera, and instead the needle hits the vinyl and Collette's Ring My Bell starts blaring out. It’s hilariously absurd.

The Hughes Brothers (Allen and Albert) have always made solid films. They started with the underrated gang flick Menace II Society, then did the equally underrated crime film Dead Presidents, before establishing themselves with the big-budget thriller From Hell (which is, weirdly, the film of theirs that cops the most criticism, despite in addition to being a superb horror film, also being the only film about Jack the Ripper worth watching).

Some reviewers pissed and moaned about this film being some sort of evangelical Christian propaganda, and I find this sort of stuff hilarious. Any film that features the bible is going to stir up the idiot pool, and the Hughes brothers knew this going in. The fact that one of them is actually an atheist makes that criticism of the film even more amusing. The book is a MacGuffin, plain and simple. In the hands of the good guys it’ll do good things, the bad guys, vice versa.

The Book of Eli is a neo-Western action film with some great underlying themes and subtext, all of it handled deftly by two directors who are true masters of their craft and consistently operate at the very top of their game. This is a very cool film.