Eli's Comin'

For a while there I was worried about all these post-apocalyptic cinematic visions of the world. What a desolate and violent place this country is gonna be after the destruction. But I have good news. The world in "The Book of Eli" is full of hot babes. Phew! For a while there I thought it was gonna suck.
So Eli is the guardian of the last bible (that's not a spoiler at all, in the movie it's a given). He's literally the keeper of the Word of God. Bad guys want to use the word to control the world. Gary Oldman is said bad guy. I'm sure Oldman owns property on three continents just simply because he's plays a mean bad guy. No exception here. He's fun and scary at the same time.
"The Book of Eli" has an advantage over it's cinematic brother "The Road". Unlike "The Road", Eli's source material isn't a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of literature. So anytime The Hughes Brothers thought things were getting a little slow, they could just lop off a head, or blow someone up in a post-apocalyptic hail of gunfire. This makes "Eli" more of a popcorn muncher, a Saturday matinee version of world distruction. "The Road" aims for loftier storytelling. Both films are concerned with how mankind will keep the light of faith and spirituality lit in the face societal breakdown. "The Road" takes a more subtle approach. It is seeking sanctuary for an allegorical inner "flame", a non-tangible purity of soul. "Eli's quest is more concrete. It's all about the Bible, the Word of God on which man has built a religious foundation. So really Eli seems to be more concerned with the preservation of Christianity than the struggle of good and evil. Not that "Eli" doesn't take advantage of some of the literary devices you learned about in High School. For instance Eli's quest eventually leads him to that bastion of scholarly Bible study, San Fransisco. Gotta wonder if Eli censored out any of those anti-gay passages found in Leviticus. Now that would be irony. The Book of Eli is flawed, sometimes even silly and the final twist is well, hard to swallow. But it might be worth buying the popcorn and watching some good actors do their post-apocalyptic thing.