Right when I was ready to throw in the towel on post-apocalyptic movies, I decided to give The Book of Eli a chance to change my mind on the genre.  What I found was a gritty and inspiring story that almost made me forget about demon angels and John Cusack's supernatural ability to escape any disaster.

Beautifully shot and very well acted, The Book of Eli is about a man making a very long journey that he feels led to make by a higher power.  He is protecting the last copy of the Bible in a 30 years post-apocalyptic time period where very few can read, and food is so scarce that many have begun engaging in cannibalism.  He feels protected on his mission and thus fights off those that try to stop him with almost super natural abilities.

While the fight scenes are impressive and extremely violent, this film plays out at an interestingly slow and quiet pace.  The saturation of the film and intriguing sound editing make it almost mesmerizing to watch, despite that at times very little is going on.  There seems to be a link between the determination of the main character and the progress of the movie.  What dialogue is said is important and worthy of later discussion, which can't be said about many films released in January.  I enjoyed that this film remained focused on this one man's journey and did not wear the audience down with unnecessary or lengthy explanations about what happened 30 years ago. 

 So How Does It End?

The film is very straightforward, so I will admit I was quite surprised by the twist ending.  Carnegie (Gary Oldman) succeeds in stealing the Bible and shoots Eli (Denzel Washington) in the process, leaving him to die.  Solara (Mila Kunis) returns to save Eli only to find him still up and traveling West to his destination, now without his book.  In a series of exchanging shots we see Carnegie break open the Bible's lock only to discover, at the same time we discover that Eli is blind, that the entire book is written in braille.  The physical Bible is now useless to him and his "empire" is collapsing around him.  Meanwhile Eli has memorized the entire thing and is reciting it to survivors at Alcatraz that can now reprint a copy on their printing press.

While I found the movie to this point to be extremely powerful, I was confused by the chosen ending with Solara suiting up to go home and, apparently, kick major butt.  While there are plenty of violent fights in the film, I felt they were with purpose for Eli to protect his Bible.  So ending with a "more violence to come" attitude felt like a strange way to cap off the film.  Instead of a feeling of hope I had a feeling of dread, which seemed odd and out of place.

This was an unexpected and fascinating treatment of an admittedly overdone theme.  I give it 4 out of 5.