Denzel Washington not only stars in, but is also an Executive Producer of, the new Hughes Brothers film, The Book of Eli. As such, I assume he had a guiding role in its creation. This post-apocalyptic story is being marketed as a brooding and violent action flick, and it definitely delivers some intense and visually spellbinding fight sequences. There's also the central mystery of that titular book Denzel's character Eli is toting around, and what's so important about it that Gary Oldman's nefarious character Carnegie would order his henchmen to kill for it. You can get all that from the trailer, but like any good trailer it hides some of the movie's true depths and intentions behind an alluring promise of drama and excitement. In fact, this movie has two big revelations to offer. One involves the plot itself, and I'll give no hints about the secrets revealed with the movie's finale (although I have a comment about them at the end of this review). The other, which is where I imagine Denzel Washington's devotion to the project came from, is the fact that this is very much a religious film with a central message about faith.
A very nasty world war ripped a hole in the sky 30 years before the movie begins, resulting in the Sun scorching much of the Earth, blinding lots of people and requiring everyone to wear sunglasses when they go outside. The Hughes Bros. show us a convincingly bleak apocalyptic wasteland, and the early scenes of Eli on his own, doing what it takes to survive with a combination of quiet competence and desperation (like hunting cats or scrounging for new boots from old bodies). There's a lot of detail to how the world works, and most of it comes across through subtle inference rather than blatant exposition. One of those details is that books are in very short supply, especially Bibles, which were burned after the war because some people blamed them for bringing about the whole mess.
