On The Book of Eli
The Book of Eli: A Movie Review
By John David Ebert
On the surface, there’s nothing new about The Book of Eli. It has all the essential plot structures of the traditional Western: the loner who wanders into town from out of the waste land, where he encounters bad guys running the town who are a bunch of lawless rogues and opportunists hoarding all the women as well as the town’s natural resources. This structure is nearly invariant from A Fistful of Dollars right down to HBO’s Deadwood television series. The look of the film’s post-apocalyptic setting, with all its crumbling highways, rusting gantries, deserted way stations and broken machinery, is derived mainly from the Mad Max movies and also John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. So the plot mechanisms and the visual furniture are all familiar to the point of being timeworn. But the film is actually about something that is very interesting and unusual for sci-fi popcorn cinema, and that is the power of media to shape civilization. Read the rest of this entry »
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