Things I Learned From Movie X: The Book of Eli
By Edwin Davies
December 2, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Eli (Denzel Washington) has a book (I get it!) he believes could help people to rebuild after the devastation wrought by an unspecified disaster. As he battles gangs of cannibals and a fatal lack of Starbucks, he stumbles into a shanty town run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man who maintains an iron grip on the town and its people and shows an above average level of interest in Eli's book. Perhaps he hopes to learn something from it, as we will now learn from the film in which he is a character.
(Incidentally, I usually try to keep these spoiler-free, or at least confine any spoilers to the later sections, but this one has one in the second section because it suited a joke, so you have been forewarned.)
The only things left after the apocalypse were a handful of survivors and one Estée Lauder counter
At the risk of engaging in grossly disproportionare hyperbole, Mila Kunis is one of the most beautiful women to have ever lived. Not only on this world, but on all other worlds and in all possible dimensions. She really is quite pretty.
Obviously, when you have as sensual a being as Mila Kunis (even her name sounds like it should be a Latin phrase meaning "sex") in your film, you don't want to hide her under layers of dust and debris and all that other stuff that makes a post-apocalyptic wasteland such a dirty buzzkill. The Hughes Brothers go too far in the opposite direction, though, by making her look far, far too glamourous for the world she inhabits. I'm not saying that a beautiful woman can't look good under under even the most difficult circumstances - notice how Naomi Watts' hair still looked fabulous no matter how much King Kong smacked her head against the jungle floor or pavement - but when you've got Denzel Washington looking battered, beaten and bruised by his experiences, the sight of The Voice of Meg Griffin walking around a barren dystopia in a fur-trimmed coat and designer sunglasses seems a bit out of place. She doesn't resemble one of the few survivors of a cataclysmic event, but rather Angeline Jolie looking to adopt some adorable cannibal children.
Holy crap, Tom Waits is in this film!
Holy crap, Tom Waits is in this film!
Sorry that I repeated myself, but I'm just so shocked to see Tom Waits, the craggy faced and gravelly-voiced singer-songwriter and self-proclaimed troubadour of drunks, outsiders and drunk outsiders everywhere, in anything other that a Jim Jarmusch film, even if it is in such a small part as a pawnbroker/repairman that Eli visits when his iPod runs out of juice. (FYI, that's not the spoiler I was talking about.) Because Tom Waits doesn't really play anyone other than himself in every film he's in - though, to his credit, he plays Tom Waits like no one else can play Tom Waits - it's not hard to make the logical leap and assume that this bedraggled hermit character is, in fact, just Tom Waits after he has survived the end of the world. (And here I was thinking that Keith Richards would be the only rock star to survive the end of days. Then again, the film doesn't explicitly say that Keith Richards didn't survive, so I can only assume that he is in charge of a rival township somewhere outside of the scope of the story.)
In that context, it's probably good that Eli is blind (that spoiler I warned you about? That was it right there) because he seems like the kind of guy who would really have been into Waits' music before planes started falling out of the sky, and if he could see Waits he would probably have derailed the whole narrative of the film by freaking out about how he got to meet Tom Waits and talking to him for ages about how much he likes Blue Valentine. Also, there's every chance that he could be one of those douchebags who complains that Waits stopped making good music when he started using Dousengonis on his albums. I hate those guys.
I miss crazy Gary Oldman
Back in the dark and ancient time known as The 1990s, if you needed someone to crazy a film up, you called Gary Oldman. Need a white drug dealer with dreadlocks who thinks he's Rastafarian and has an almost incomprehensible accent? Gary Oldman. Drug-addled detective out to kill a young Padme (Haha, reminded you that the prequels exist!)? Gary Oldman. Possibly Texan space CEO with a metal plate and a Gerard Way haircut? Oldman that shit right up.
Nowadays, though, Gary Oldman is respectable. Thanks to his stoic turn as Jim Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman films, it's hard to think of Gary Oldman as anything other than a salt of the Earth guy trying to make sense of a world spiralling into oblivion. Why, nowadays if I told you that Gary Oldman was going to play Matthew McConaughey's midget brother, your first response would be, "That's insane! And who are you?" Whereas as recently as 2003, when he played Matthew McConaughey's midget brother in the hilariously awful Tiptoes, the common response would be, "That's insane! But that is the sort of thing that Gary Oldman would do. Also, who are you?"
So it was great getting to see Oldman let loose as Carnegie, the bibliophilic maniac after Eli and his precious cargo. It wasn't quite the same, though, but rather a brief wallow in nostalgia. Watching Gary Oldman return to being unhinged is like seeing The Smashing Pumpkins live after they reformed; the songs are the same, but the passion's gone. But even played without passion those songs are still pretty kick-ass.
The Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth
"Knowledge is power," or so Sir Francis Bacon and G.I. Joe would have us believe, but rarely has that idea been conveyed in as clear and obvious terms as it is in The Book of Eli. Both the hero and the villain are special because they can read, and are therefore able to control the ideas that people are exposed to. Eli believes that everyone should have access to the teachings contained in his book (though the film is a little vague on how not showing the book to anyone, then getting Malcolm MacDowell to make a copy of it which he proceeds to leave on a shelf in Alcatraz, will accomplish this noble aim) whilst the other wants to manipulate the information contained in the book so as to control the way people think and act. (In case you're all wondering, the book in question is a copy of Martha Stewart's Quick Cook. Sorry, The Bible. I always get those mixed up since Martha Stewart's Quick Cook is my Bible.) What connects these two men who have such wholly different ambitions?
They are both nerds.
Think about it; they both like books, they both enjoy bossing people around who are dumber than they are, and they are both having much too good a time considering their situation. Nerds love to talk about what they would do in an apocalyptic situation, and both Eli and Carnegie seem like a couple of guys who are finally getting the chance to act out all their wildest LAARPing fantasies. Plus, did you see the martial arts moves that Eli used to take out those guys at the start? He's clearly the sort of person who (back when he could see) used to watch a ton of anime, practiced all the moves in his bedroom, then spent hours discussing it on 4chan.