Movie Review: The Book of Eli

SPOILER ALERT: The following post contains key plot details of the Movie. Don't read it if you don't want the movie spoiled. You've been warned. Stop reading now... Spoilers coming up very soon...

So, The Book of Eli. What's it about? It's set in a post-apocalyptic world, where it looks like just about everything has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. The events of the movie focus around Eli, a man who is on a journey, delivering a book to safety. Along the way he bumps into various thugs, who happen to be looking for the book. This allows for a whole lot of action scenes, where we see Eli kick a lot of arse. Turns out he's pretty skilled at hand to hand combat, and incredibly lucky, seemingly able to dodge bullets. It's gratifying to see him dish out just desserts to various ill-doers.

Eventually he makes it through to the end, and here's the twist - it turns out that the book is the bible. Wow, who would have picked this? It turns out that the apocalypse had something to do with the bible, some sort of holy war, and that because of this, people destroyed all the bibles they could find. All except this one, which Eli found, and was instructed by a voice in the sky to take to safety.

To be honest, that twist turned this fairly enjoyable B-grade action movie into a frustrating preachy parable. If you're going to claim that the bible is an valuable book, and that what is written in the book is important, then you should take a look in the book and see what's written in the thing! As naive as it sounds, Eli (or at least the writers) should have asked themselves 'what would Jesus do?'. And I'm pretty sure Jesus would avoid killing all the enemies that stand in the way. Whatever happened to turning the other cheek? Whatever happened to 'whoever lives by the sword will die by the sword'?

I guess what I see is a conflict between ideas about the bible. On one hand you have a 'them versus us' attitude, which emphasizes our own righteousness, and our eventual will triumph over the wicked. In this approach, violence against the unrighteous is justified, and ultimately it is acceptable to desire the destruction of our enemies. This is the typical approach a lot of movies take, which assert that violence is necessary for the triumph of good. While it makes for exciting movies, I believe this idea is absolutely and totally wrong.

I believe the message of Jesus is that there is no "righteous", there is no "wicked", no them or us, we're all humans. We are meant to want the best for our enemies, hoping that we can be reconciled. Violence is not necessary for the triumph of good, in fact, violence itself seldom leads to good.

So at the end of the movie I found myself with a sense of disquiet. The makers of the movie wanted to make a movie emphasizing the importance of the bible, but they made a movie that portrays exactly what the bible teaches against...