If you haven't seen The Book of Eli yet, you may not want to read past this first paragraph.  What follows is a fairly spoiler-heavy look into why I think the movie works so well.  If you just want to know if it's worth seeing, the answer is yes.  But Eli is a film that's worth talking about in some depth--worth dissecting and debating, and none of that works without giving up some of the film's key plot points.  So be warned, SPOILERS lurk below.

 The film's marketing campaign only barely tried to preserve the mystery of Eli's book, and that was probably less out of a need to keep that plot point a secret than it was out of a feeling that giving it away would turn potential viewers off.  On the surface, The Book of Eli is a well-shot and coolly-acted mashup of genre film styles that should appeal to any film geek.  The Hughes brothers take a samurai, drop him into a western, and then set the whole thing in a post-apocalyptic future.  The events of Mad Max could easily be taking place simultaneously on the other side of the globe, and at the same time it wouldn't seem strange to see a posse ride up on horseback.  The film references classic western showdowns complete with dust sweeping across an empty street, but it also borrows the hacked and taped-together aesthetic from Beyond Thunderdome and it winds up being a most unsuspecting descendent of Zatoichi.  There's a Boy and his Dog poster on the wall when Eli is captured, and there's a shot near the end that looks ripped almost exactly from the recent classic Children of Men.  All of this adds up to a film that's fun to watch even if it's only a geeky blend of genre tropes, but Eli is still much more than that.

 As Denzel Washington's character Eli attempts to protect what may be the last surviving copy of the King James Bible, the typical man-on-a-mission motif is given a little more depth.  There are plenty of films where a loner walks alone across a wasteland on some kind of trek, but Eli's mission is noble and perhaps even sacred.  He's not a man of God and the movie makes sure to point out early on that he is no saint.  While he's generally kinder than others around him and unwilling to cheat and use others, he's not above profiting from violence or from others' misfortune.  He's not a holy man, and yet there is something righteous about him that even some of his enemies can sense.  Like Clive Owen's character in Children of Men, Eli is a damaged but capable hero who knows that his mission must succeed, even if he isn't exactly clear on what that mission is.

Gary Oldman's Carnegie, on the other hand, is part mustache-twirling villain and part pragmatist.  He doesn't mind abusing and manipulating people to get what he needs to survive, but he doesn't go so far as to come off as a sadist.  He's trying to wrestle some order out of the chaos of a world where people have turned to violence and cannibalism to survive, and it's easy enough to see how his vision of control over the handfuls of people left in the world is self-serving but also might not be such a bad idea.  After all, civilization in Eli's world isn't just crumbling, it is on the very brink of extinction.  Water, food, money, and shelter simply aren't enough to sustain people who are running out of hope as quickly as they run out of supplies.  Carnegie understands the power that a fully-formed, elegantly-scripted religion can have on a group like that, and while he may want to control people with it, he's essentially doing what so many leaders and tyrants have done before him.

So while the external conflict is one of swordfights and showdowns and chases down dusty roads, the film's deeper conflict is one between the forces of religion that always seem at odds.  Eli is guided by faith, blindly doing the work that he believes the Lord has asked him to do.  Carnegie is ready to wrangle that kind of faith to keep people from tearing the last remnants of the world apart, but he doesn't believe in the message as much as he does the message's power.  It's a classic struggle between the ideas that the Bible contains, and the way in which people use those ideas for something that they are not.  I love that a movie where Denzel Washington slices off arms and heads with a futuristic machete can really be about the way that people use and misuse the things that they believe in.

The Hughes Brothers have made a very Christian movie that is in fact not very pro-religion.  In fact, the very state of things in the film may be the result of religious tension that has finally boiled over into an apocalypse.  They paint religion with a cynical brush, where even in a world with a tiny population that doesn't read or remember anything about religion, men like Carnegie will always be around to exploit people's fear and need for hope.  Eli is on a noble mission to save the book, but he's not even exactly sure where he is going or what the value is in what he's doing.  That doesn't say much about the correctness of his belief, only that his faith is strong enough to guide him through 30 years of unimaginable peril.  Eli could just as easily be crazy as he could be 'saved' or righteous, and I think that in the end, the Hughes brothers do a smart thing by not paying off his quest with a renaissance of Christianity.  

The Book of Eli winds up being about the power of the Bible and the strength of faith without ever preaching that one has to subscribe to its message.  That's a pretty uncanny feat in my mind--to make a film that reveres faith and the Good Book without requiring an altar call, and while pointing out that in any desperate situation, the same book and same qualities in people can lead to terrible things.  When Eli delivers the book to an organization that is not trying to re-indoctrinate people but that is simply trying to preserve the pieces of essential human culture that have been destroyed, there's a powerful moment when the Bible feels holy and good in a way that it usually doesn't in films where it's assumed that the viewer is coming at things from a Christian point of view.  It's a wise choice by the film makers and it reminds me of all of the things I admire about people who are guided by faith and ideals, and indeed all of the things about the Bible that are powerfully good when they are not corrupted.

I don't think that The Book of Eli is a perfect film by any stretch--Mila Kunis and Malcolm McDowell are badly mis-cast and the film doesn't know where to end, dragging just a few minutes past what would be a dramatic final shot.  But there are so many things that the Hughes' get right, from the wonderful score to the camera work that lets the action breathe to the fight choreography to the belief that the audience doesn't need to have the details of the world spelled out in exposition.  It's truly a remarkable movie, and one that thrilled me in moments and moved me in others.  The studio was wise to keep the Bible and the film's religious themes out of the trailers, but it's a strange world where so many badly-produced Christian films fail to make their point, when one well-thought-out and entertaining R-rated one winds up being the perfect reflection on and celebration of faith.