Country: USA
Genre: Action / Adventure / Drama / Western
Direction: Albert Hughes
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon,
A post-apocalyptic tale, in which a lone man fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind.
Download The Book of Eli (2010) in DVD quality
Movie Review:
We have had more end-of-the-world duress than we can stand lately, but Eli, crowned with excellent and rousing action scenes, evocative cinematography and a refreshing spiritual subtext is the genre’s best entry since they laid Mad Max to rest. Filmgoers looking for a bit of weekend popcorn fun will find themselves surprised by it. This is the apocalypse with a sense of the thought-provoking and the profound. Best of all, it turns out to be a hum-dinger of a samurai film.
When it all ended is never made perfectly clear, because we aren’t ever certain of the current date. Eli, the wandering warrior who evokes the spirit of bushido samurai crossed with an Old Testament prophet, says it’s been 30-plus years since the whole thing broke down. It’s been long enough anyhow for the life expectancy to rapidly drop, rendering most of the current population youngsters who were born after the nuclear apocalypse that ruptured a hole in the Earth’s protective shielding and let in the destructive rays of the sun.
Most of the world is like Solara (Mila Kunis), a feisty young woman living in a wrecked way-station that is learning to be a town again. Solara’s mother (Jennifer Beals) is a blind woman under the forcible control of the town’s leader, the sinister and opportunistic Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Their existence is a stifled and brutal one, but it beats life beyond the protection of the town, where those turned by the sun’s radiation seek out human flesh and the opportunity to waylay passers-by and take their…Wet Naps? Yes, in this moribund future seemingly irrelevant things have become prized possessions.
Enter Eli, who comes into the town carrying with him a book. A book he will protect above all else, and a book that Carnegie needs to get if he ever wants to rule the remainder of the population the way he wants. He pushes, and Eli pushes back, and then the action fireworks fly as Carnegie and his men set out after Eli and Solara, who has bonded with the lone wolf and followed him out of town. Instead of dropping all the film’s most spectacular pieces in one section of the film, the Hughes Brothers have generously spaced the picture’s many battles throughout. The details of a world shattered by war are abundant and specific. One of my favorite scenes involves a hunter stalking game through a forest of snowy white ash and drawing his quarry into his bow’s sights: the menu? Hairless cat.
The acting is top-notch for this kind of thing and the performers don’t look down upon the material or coast on their reputations. Gary Oldman has played bad so many times that his picture is in the dictionary, but he’s never played bad badly and that remains true here where he takes a one-note black hat and transforms him into a dangerously practical man that believes only in power he can wield. I haven’t seen Beals in ages, but she’s radiant and fragile here as Oldman’s downtrodden mate. Mila Kunis as Solara, the acolyte to Washington’s spiritual samurai, shows new facets as an actress that never saw the light during her television days. Michael Gambon plays a crazy farmer who may have eaten more than his fair share of human meat but who’s still willing to help protect Eli and the book he carries. Even Tom Waits shows up as a greaseball engineer. When Waits is the guy recharging your batteries, you know the end is well nigh.
Finally, there is Denzel as Eli. This is one of his best performances. Eli is a man of single-minded determination, carrying what he believes to be hope for all. He is also, when the need arises, capable of swift and violent retribution. Washington understands this and plays his character as a morally righteous man whose faith hasn’t just set him free of the death sentence of this world; it’s also charged him with rescuing it if he can. What he learns along the way is that the secrets housed within his book are more than just words; they have impact he has yet to fully experience. Here is a man who will quote psalms in one breath and blithely decapitate someone with another, and yet he doesn’t come across as a contradiction. This is a magnificent performance in a film that is far better than I would have expected it to be. 2009 was a stellar year for science fiction and if Eli is any indicator, 2010 will give it a run for its money.
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