wannabepriest

Late last week, I visited our local cinema with a small but growing group of men from our church to check out one of the latest releases. In this instance, we found ourselves watching The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, written by Gary Whitta and directed by the Hughes brothers (who have been a bit MIA since Dead Presidents in 1995).

I was quietly impressed by this movie and would encourage you to go and see it.

Denzel is the eponymous Eli, a traveller walking across a post-apocalyptic America, trying to survive and (as we learn) carrying a rather special book. With, no doubt, a nod to one of the names of God in Hebrew (El or Eli), Eli is carrying the last known copy of the Bible.

We are not given a totally worked out back history (which I liked). We are told there was a war, a ‘big flash’ some thirty odd years ago, and nobody seems to know very much of what actually happened. The younger characters born post-flash are intrigued by Denzel’s knowledge, as an older man, of the world before it turned into the hell-hole that they know. Their world is one where barren roads are patrolled by gangs of killers who will slaughter people first and then find out after whether they have anything worth taking, whether that is water, a pair of shoes, a lighter or even KFC wet-wipes.

Some spoilers follow:

Eli is a peaceful man who only acts in self defence. However, if you push him to defend himself, Eli becomes a killing machine of the first order, able to dispatch a bunch of armed cutthroats with nothing more than a machete. For the blood-thirsty action-hungry market, this film will tick all the boxes with plenty of fights, dead bodies, explosions and swift martial-art style hand-to-hand combat.

As Eli makes his way west across the States, he enters a town run by a man called Carnegie (Gary Oldman) – the villain of the piece. Carnegie sends out teams of thugs to glean what they can from the wastelands but is particularly interested in finding books and one book in particular. Although the word ‘Bible’ is not mentioned in the film (as far as I can remember) until the very last few scenes, it’s clear that the Bible is the book that Carnegie is after. There’s a lovely little moment when one of the thugs brings back a haul of books and Oldman disgustedly discards a copy of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code like rubbish as he searches for a copy of the Bible. Carnegie wants it in order to control people. He believes that if he has it, he has words of great power with which he can rule the weak-minded and ignorant and build himself an empire.

Anyway, Eli comes to town and, as we soon discover, has in his possession a copy of the Bible. Needless to say, the majority of the film then becomes an action-filled chase with plenty of bodies and explosions along the way as Eli protects the book and Carnegie tries to get his hands on it.

Serious ending spoiler alert (highlight to read)

Carnegie eventually gets his hands on the book, Eli mortally wounded in the process and forced to rely on Solara, a young girl he has met in Carnegie’s town, to get him ‘out of dodge’ and on his way to his final destination in the far west of America. Eli seeks a delapidated and crumbling San Francisco where, on Alcatraz, a guarded community are setting about gathering the cultural remnants of civilisation in order to build again. Even though we know Carnegie has Eli’s Bible, Eli declares to the armed guards that he has a copy of the King James Bible in his possession.

Here comes the big twist. Eli is blind and has committed the copy of the King James Bible to memory. Suddenly, I found myself, Sixth Sense style going back through the film trying to work out how I never saw that coming. I am definitely going to need a second watch of this movie as a result. Eli proceeds to recite it to the head of this cloistered community, Lombardi (Malcolm McDowell), who writes it down and then produces a fresh copy of the Scriptures from the community’s reconstituted printing press. Meanwhile, Carnegie opens Eli’s book to find it is written in Braille and that he can’t read a word of it.

The Book of Eli is pretty well done. I thought it was fairly well written (although not great) and with two good performances from two powerhouse actors in Washington and Oldman who do what they are asked to do (which isn’t a great deal) extremely well. It will appeal to action/violence junkies since there is plenty of both and it is certainly being marketed as such a movie in most of the stuff I have seen.

However, on another level, this is a film that is clearly been aimed at the growing Hollywood realisation that there is money to be made in the USA by selling to the Christian market. I do wonder how such a market will cope with the R rating (15 in the UK, would have been 18 ten years ago for its level of violence). However, Christians will thoroughly approve of the vaunted status given to the Bible by the plot and its given role as the key to restoring order within this post-apocalyptic world.

The approaches of the central characters to the Bible are key. Carnegie knows that he can use the Bible as a tool to harness people by threatening them with the fear of hell. For Eli, he seeks a home for the Bible in which the Scriptures can be utilised, not to control, but to usher in a world of peace by allowing God to speak to humanity once again when God’s voice has been all but lost.

Another end spoiler alert (highlight to read)

The third, late arriving, Lombardi displays a third attitude to the Scriptures. Eager to have them written and printed again from Eli’s memory, in one of the most tragic scenes of the whole film, Lombardi promptly takes the freshly pressed leather bound King James and places it on a shelf next to the Qu’ran and the Torah where it can gather dust and await some mythical never-to-come moment in the re-building of civilisation, rather than (as Eli might have hoped) having the Scriptures opened and read and becoming their guiding light in such a re-building project.

There’s a good few scenes that could be used here as discussion starters and the film itself has plenty to say about the Bible, about people’s varying attitudes towards it and what the world might look like if we ever really forgot about its existence. I’m not sure you need to necessarily go to the cinema to see it, but it is definitely one to watch – whether you choose the big screen or DVD.