Thou shall not pass.
The latest from the Hughes Brothers (their first since 2001’s fairly underrated
From Hell) starts out with promise. A beautifully constructed shot of a dead man, shot between the eyes, lying in a broken, muted forest drops us immediately in the middle of a post-apocalyptic dystopia. This world is instantly familiar in its construction of a cross between the frontier style of an old western, and every other post-apocalyptic film you’ve likely ever seen: the roaming biker gangs, the lone wanderer, the single-street, broken-down towns…right down to the steampunk goggles. It’s a pity that the story, harnessed by a few one-note performances, doesn’t do much to let this dystopia resonate.
Gary Oldman is trying really, really hard to help make this not suck.
The beauty of dystopian futures is the relevance we can bring to our contemporary life – the warning bells it rings, whether subtle or resolute – that let a film well and truly sink in. Unfortunately,
The Book of Eli rings a little hollow. Perhaps its moralizing is too shallow, perhaps too thick, for the film to really work. Eli (Denzel Washington) is literally on a mission from God, carrying the last copy of the King James Bible out west (why are they always heading west?) to where he knows that it will be used to help save humankind – although he clearly states earlier in the film that all the bibles were destroyed because people generally thought they were the cause of the wars that led to the apocalypse. Hm. Carnegie (Gary Oldman) is the Big Man in the small town who wants the bible for what we are supposed to infer are nefarious purposes.
A candid, behind-the-scenes shot.
presents an interesting paradox: it is heavy-handed in its theme without really saying anything conclusive at all. It’s hard to find a theme that is carried throughout the film, other than that Eli is a stock cowboy/samurai character and Carnegie is his black-hatted adversary. Thus, one tends to lose interest. Washington finds a stoicism in Eli that seems well-suited to the character, while Oldman is undergoing an exercise in futility as he struggles to find any depth in his. Mila Kunis tries her best, but seems out of her element as Solara, Eli’s newfound apprentice. As beautifully shot as the film is – a standout being the silhouetted scene where Eli takes on an entire gang of hijackers and wins – it doesn’t really take off. Even a third act appearance by Frances “Madame Maxine” de la Tour and Michael “Dumbledore” Gambon does little to move the film on its way. In short, the production design and cinematography are spectacular, especially in the realization of the neo-western town, but they do little to service the story, and, if anything, distract us from it. Also, one does wonder: 30 years post-apocalypse, if Chapstick is hard to come by, then where do the baddies get so many bullets?
Previously published at Press Plus 1.
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