The Book of Eli [HD]

Eye-opening
The Book of Eli is a vastly underappreciated film that mixes martial arts swordsmanship, a post-apocalyptic setting, and a biblical narrative.

A war, over thirty years ago, killed off many people in the United States. Others were blinded from the blast. This creates an interesting disparity between those over thirty years of age who received an education and those under thirty who know nothing of the modern world (at one point, one of the thugs asks, "What's a television?").

This is an unpleasant world. Cannibalistic brigands ambush unwary travelers, identifiable by their shaking hands. Water is at a premium. Batteries are hard to find. The Book of Eli makes it clear that there's no currency, only barter.

Roaming the land is Eli (a subdued Denzel Washington), carrying a book with a cross on it. This book is greatly desired by Carnegie (a greasy Gary Oldman), who is also old enough to remember the power such a tome can have over the people. While...

Fallout 3: The Movie.
I was hesitant to watch The Book of Eli for a while because of mixed things I'd read. Some people claimed it to be 'too religious' and others said the movie was just plain boring. Honestly, the trailers I'd seen didn't exactly win me over, but I gave the movie a shot when I was sick one day, and man did I enjoy it. If you've played the Fallout games, especially Fallout 3, you will -love- The Book of Eli. So many similarities in the look of the wasteland, in the combat scenes, the importance of water, and more. But even if you never played Fallout 3, The Book of Eli is a very enjoyable movie, provided you're not one of those people that immediately hates anything 'religious' and claims a movie is preachy, given that the subject matter here is religion...so that kind of makes you weird to say that. I'm not a Christian, and I'm definitely not an Atheist, but I didn't find anything 'preachy' about The Book of Eli.

The world is in shambles. There's no law for the most part...

A good post-apocalyptic tale
The post-apocalypse sub-genre of science fiction has always been a place I like to go. I'll give movies of this type some slack I wouldn't always give other kinds, so that even a relatively weak post-apoc flick like Doomsday (in which Malcolm McDowell appeared, as he does here) still has its interesting moments. But if it's a good one such as I Am Legend, I'm really into it bigtime. So I've been eagerly anticipating The Book of Eli from the time the first trailers appeared, and now that I've seen it there were many things about it I liked. Start with the mythic prophet main character. His super-heroic weapons skills showed there was something unique about him early on. Those scenes were generally pretty cool, and they were spread out pretty well over the length of the film. (Any more fight scenes would have bored me.) Eli's story plays out with a kind of grim determinism, although it also has hopeful elements as well. I was glad I wasn't previously familiar with the story, as...

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