“The Book of Eli” chronicles a world hanging on the relentless determination and spiritual vision of a single man.  This could also describe “The Book of Eli” as a Hollywood production: without Denzel Washington, the Hughes Brothers would have an inconsequential B-movie on their hands.  But Washington has the star power to carry the film: quietly charismatic, grizzled, catlike.  He’s every bit the man of faith Eli should be, and he raises the quality of this interesting but derivative film tenfold.  The gravity he gives Eli is crucial to a story that relies so heavily on the redemptive quest of one man.  Washington is a star with appeal to black and white audiences, and it's interesting to wonder how the film reflects the aura of myth and redemption surrounding the current occupant of the White House.  Following on Will Smith’s solid turn as a world-saving scientist in “I Am Legend”, would audiences even accept a white actor in the same role?

Surreal, nightmarish, Daliesque detritus litter a washed-out, rust and beige toned post-apocalyptic landscape: miles of destroyed cars, freeways to nowhere, a downed jumbo jet, rusting freighters in San Francisco bay with the rotting shell of the city looming fuzzily behind it.  The Hughes brothers don’t over do it, presenting a sparse desert landscape, more Spaghetti Western and “Mad Max” than an urban inferno like “I Am Legend”. There‘s humor without kitsch, mostly relating to the different times.  Carnegie tells his henchman to search a TV in the house.  “What’s a TV?” asks the baffled thug.  (Later the same henchman loads a shotgun to blow his head off, so he’s not far from experiencing TV for himself.)  Eli caves up a gang of maurauders underneath a faded freeway clearance sign that reads 16:4, possibly referring to Jeremiah 16:4: “They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried”.  A cockroach is seen crawling on a wall as the camera pans to find the bug’s fellow nuclear-holocaust survivors, Solara and Eli.  Best of all are the subtle ironies tucked into the story for film buffs: A wall has a film poster for “A Boy And His Dog”; Eli’s journey is an escape to Alacatraz; and the civilization-preserving Librarian is played by Malcolm Macdowell, the actor who made his name playing a barbarian assaulting civilization in “A Clockwork Orange”.

“The Book of Eli” is certainly a message film, as the ending makes clear: do good.  Have faith.  Shoot straight.  Certainly the Hughes Brothers swung for the allegorical fences with the plot resolution and doubled down with the clever twist regarding Eli himself.   It is impossible to enjoy the film as a pure adrenaline rush, as with “The Road Warrior”.  The meaning of the book is important to the plot.  At one point I thought perhaps the book would contain nuclear launch codes or a cryptographic key to unlock a mountain silo containing an army of robots.  Can the movie really hold the Bible in such high esteem?  Yes, it can.  As the story unfolds, this unusual element becomes more and more important considering the film’s debt to other films of this type, from “The Road Warrior” to Spaghetti Westerns to recent fare like “Children of Men”.  Indeed, the bravura camerawork in the film comes in a climactic fire-fight which would be a small masterpiece of direction were it not so similar to Alfonso Cuaron’s sweeping continuous camera shots in the car-chase scene in “Children of Men”.  No, “The Book of Eli” really is a book.  Not code for computer, not a cookbook for aliens, not a book with a device hidden in its pages.  Just a Bible, and that’s more than enough.

Adding up the pieces presents a message more sophisticated than it first appears.  First, Eli’s victory only opens the possibility of a rediscovery of The Bible.  The shot of the Librarian adding a newly-printed King James Version (“Alcatraz Press”) to a shelf containing many other books, flanked on either side by the Torah and the Koran, is the sort of ambiguous fate met by the Ark of the Covenant in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.  The Bible may or may not contain its religious potency; the Librarian seems to value it as a crucial missing piece in his collection of major Western cultural artifacts, no more or less important than Shakespeare or Mozart.  Second, the film clearly affirms a non-literalist reading of the Bible.  Eli has memorized the book, but only after meeting Solara does he understand what the book actually means.  “Do more for others than you do for yourself” is his enlightened interpretation.  But while the movie affirms the value of the Bible, there is also the tricky backstory of the war thirty years earlier: apparently the nuclear holocaust was caused by fundamentalist Christians.

Yet the film cannot be taken as a de-Christianized fable that doesn’t take sides.  A curious thread left dangling is the question of who or what sent Eli on his mission.  He tells Solara he heard a voice speak to him 29 years earlier, as if coming from inside of him, instructing him to look for the Bible underneath some rubble.  He finds it.  The voice then instructs him to walk westward without telling him where he‘s going.  Eli only knows his destination when he reaches San Francisco.  Given what we learn of Eli at the end, it is likely that the voice was indeed supernatural, the voice of an angel or of God.  There is simply no way Eli could have completed his mission without guidance. The other alternative is that he was sent on his mission by someone who knew of the Alcatraz project, which seems less likely (but does add a new layer of retrospective interest, because that would mean that Eli was consciously mythologizing his quest as he went along).