War, War never changes…

This being my first movie review, I thought I would go for one of the slightly overshadowed movies of this year, with Avatar sweeping the box office audiences up by the thousands, quite a few films have been overlooked by the public, The Book Of Eli is the perfect example of one of these movies. This was a actually recommended to me by a mate of mine sometime ago, although I only got around to seeing it with a few people last night. Our choices were;

Invictus – Morgan Freeman and Sweaty south Africans, not perhaps the best combination, although it would probably make a very interesting reality show.

Avatar – The big one which incidentally I haven’t seen yet, the length was an issue here.

Astroboy! – Just kidding.

Anyway, The Book Of Eli is an interesting film with a setting similar to the legendary Fallout 3’s post nuclear wasteland, with vast deserts and self built towns reminiscent to the spaghetti western movies immediately you can tell how well made the sets are. The film stars Denzel Washington with a machete as Eli, Gary Oldman (FOR THE MOTHERLAND!*) with a town and an almost endless army of people in paintball masks and bad airsoft gear plays Carnegie, and the rather ‘phwoar’ Mila Kunis as Solara. The cast is fairly well picked and Denzel Washing  ton pulls off the mysterious albeit cool Eli rather well and adds quite a bit of depth to the character.

*Oldman is Reznov the lovable commie in Call of Duty: World at War.

'I DONT WANNA SET THE WORLLDDD OOONN FIREEEEE' Fallout's wasteland coming through in the movie, Add a dog and turn Denzel round, and you have the boxart.

The Book of Eli is a film that you get back what you put in concentration wise, the story is quite deep and can get fairly complicated if you aren’t paying attention or practically yelling in whisper form; ‘BOOM HEADSHOT’ or ‘UAV ready for deployment’ every time Eli kills some people. The deep story revolves around Eli’s book (obviously) which (MINOR SPOILERS) is a bible, the last in existence to be precise. Oldman’s character, Carnegie is trying to hunt down the bible, as he grew up with it before the nuclear war and is trying to expand his cities and rule the wastes, but has had no luck finding it, but then Eli comes along with an Ipod and empty battery that needs charging, he is given the offer to work with Carnegie on expanding, but refuses, Carnegie then sends Solara to ‘comfort’ Eli in his room, but he turns her down (Quoting one of my mates James: ‘Why the fuck not?!’) He has dinner with Solara in the average way, but, says grace before eating. After Eli has left, a guard gets a bullet in the face after Solara says grace and Carnegie recognises it, realising Eli has the book, the rest unfolds from there.

Eli, from the start of the film is simply travelling west, if you didn’t get the reference that to ‘go west’ means to die and go to heaven, then this is probably the point that you will lose the idea of the film until about three quarters of the way through, this is somewhat unfortunate, as the person next you will probably constantly be asking you ‘why’ that happened or he is saying stuff etc. Despite having quite a few action scenes, the point of this film is more ‘philosophical’ that just mindless violence, which is fine, but seeing somebody get owned with a giant axe or throwing knife never gets old, and the twists and turns in the plotline may be a bit too much for some people. In fact one person next to me walked out and didn’t come back when the film got all deep and philosophical, although there is a Nando’s right next to the cinema, and maybe he had a bad one.

At this point in the movie, I immediately did my caption price impression. "LETS DO THIS"

The film is not entirely serious, with a pretty hilarious part involving Michael Gambon and some big guns that I am not going to ruin for you, but you will probably find it on YouTube in a few weeks, along with about 18 remixes of it. The action scenes are pretty awesome too, with ‘OHOOOO’ moments throughout the fighting scenes, as well as little snippets of violence throughout. The plot twists I mentioned before, should keep you hooked and guessing, although occasionally the predictability of what is going to happen shows up a little bit towards the end, this isn’t too major though.

The soundtrack is fairly decent, although the first time Eli listens to his iPod is a pretty good part, which they could have easily reused the song in the end credits, but didn’t, If you have seen the film you may agree it would have rounded off the ending a little better.

The one problem I had with this film is how slowly it starts, it takes quite a long time for it to pick up enough, although, once it does, you are in for a good ride.

So overall The Book Of Eli is a film you have to understand, getting references and links back to the earlier parts of the film is an important part of watching this one, and it’s not quite a film you could go and see just for the action aspects of it. I would recommend picking this up on Blu-ray as a film to watch when you’re in the mood for something deep, but not boring.

-Dean Case