Watched The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman this week. The week before I watched The Road with Viggo Mortensen. While Eli has Hollywood's fingerprints all over it, The Road is a pretty faithful adaptation of the bleak but beautiful novel by Cormac McCarthy. Both are set in a ravaged America, where survivors scrape out a living in a grim and dangerous world complete with bands of cannibals and rapists.
The Road wisely stays away from explaining too much of its backstory. It is set within about ten years of some kind of cataclysmic event that has wiped out most of humanity and life on Earth. Because there are no plants or animals left, the surviving human beings have largely resorted to cannibalism. This is horrifically illustrated by a scene in which Mortensen's character and his son stumble upon a human slaughterhouse, where people are kept alive as their limbs are removed.
This seems like a pretty realistic scenario to me. It seems that in order to survive, people would do just about anything. The "good guys," to which the son character refers in the movie, i.e. non-cannibals, only survive by sheer luck. The rest of humanity, while not thriving, is certainly surviving.
The Book of Eli represents a slightly more livable and civilized world, where there is at least some sense of order. It is almost as though the producers read The Road and decided to use it as a backdrop for an action movie. The movie slowly spills out it's rather vague and silly backstory. There was a war. People blamed it on religion. People burned all the bibles. Denzel Washington's character is tasked with taking the last known bible to its sanctuary. Gary Oldman plays the fascist boss of a town of survivors who seeks a copy of the bible to use to create a kind of expansive religious state.
While the movie has a bleak Western beauty to it and two truly great actors in the leads, The Book of Eli falls into its own plot holes. The backstory doesn't survive scrutiny. I really can't imagine an America where people get so fed up with religion that they destroy ALL the bibles. I mean, there are really quite a few bibles out there. Possibly more than there are people.
America is pretty depressed right now. And America is a big drama queen. When drama queens get upset, they like to imagine The End. They like to think about all of the bad things that would happen if they were dead. "You took my laws and infrastructure for granted. You still want smaller government when there is a gang of cannibals on the front lawn?"
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