Cult-Movie Review: Doomsday (2008)

Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008) is all about...ingredients. 

The film is a visually stunning, high-impact pastiche of ingredients from many post-apocalyptic films, particularly those that were made in the seventies and early eighties. The film tells an original story, but one with recognizable elements from Mad Max (1979), Escape from New York (1981) and other beloved genre films.

In a sense, the Marshal film showcases a good alternative to today’s brand-name “remake” obsession and seeming compulsion. Instead of remaking a beloved post-apocalyptic film, Doomsday instead throws six or seven such efforts into the pot, stirs them up, and serves them to viewers as something fresh. 

The result is an action movie in which you recognize the pieces, but the whole is something new and different. The movie is a variation on a theme, but not a cash-grab rehash.

An extremely gory and violent film, Doomsday proves impressive in terms of its stunts and action sequences, but it also features some narrative blind alleys. The result is movie of intermittent success, of some highs and a few lows.  It’s fun recognizing all the influences and ingredients when they appear on screen, and Doomsday never fails to rivet the attention.

But in the end, the film doesn’t quite reach the level of "classic" enjoyed by so many of its brethren and creative inspirations.

“Once you’re over that wall, there’s no rules…no back up.”

In Glasgow, in April of 2008, a mystery virus infects the population. Only a few people escape, including a healthy little girl, Eden.  

Before long, all of Scotland is sealed off from the rest of the UK to stop the spread of the disease.

In 2035, the plague suddenly re-appears in London (Rhona Mitra), and Eden, now a major, is summoned by the Prime Minister (Alexander Siddig) to go inside the Quarantine Zone on a crucial mission. 

In particular, satellites have shown that life has continued inside the Quarantine Zone, which must mean that there is a cure for the disease.  Indeed, a doctor -- Marcus Kane (Malcolm McDowell) -- was working on just such an antidote when the city was quarantined in the first place.  Perhaps he is still alive, and has completed his work.

Unfortunately, the Administration wants the cure for England but to give it only to selected few...so that Britain can "thin out" the herd, and reduce over-population.

Eden Sinclair leads a team in two armored transports into the Quarantine Zone to recover Kane and hopefully his cure to the plague.  

Instead, she runs across cannibalistic savages led by his mad son, Sol (Craig Conway)...

“It’s Medieval out there.”

Doomsday draws its life-blood primarly from the post-apocalyptic and dystopian cinema of the 1970s. Although Marshall presents a coherent narrative, the film moves from influence to influence, knowingly reminding viewers of classics of the format.

For instance, the film starts with the same creative technique as Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). 

There, as you recall, beleaguered SWAT officers went into an urban tenement building, and fought a bloody battle with its residents...before the first zombies were even seen.  

In some way, this scene punctured or blew up the idea that the zombie apocalypse had made mankind violent.  Pretty clearly, he was already violent, and the violence in George Romero’s Dawn is human against human first. Then the zombies get in, feeding off the carnage.  The ghouls are just one more problem to contend with, but not the first problem. The tenement shoot-out captures and expresses that idea.

Similarly, Doomsday’s hero, Eden Sinclair, is first seen on the job early in the film, tracking down and killing brutal criminals.  These shoot-out sequences are over-the-top bloody (much like those in Dawn’s tenement opener), a key reminder to viewers that apocalypse isn’t the thing that rouses us to violence.  

That violence already exists within us, even in “normal” civilization.   

One kill involving a woman in a bath-tub is especially gruesome, and a police officer gets half his face blown off in one fire-fight.  But this scene is important because it acknowledges that Eden Sinclair operates in a violent, corrupt world, even before she undertakes her mission for the Prime Minister.

Next up, Doomsday adopts many qualities and aspects of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), a dystopian if not apocalyptic film. For instance, Eden at times wears a patch over her eye, like Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), at times.   

Then, Eden is given a GPS locator (just as Snake is tracked by the government in Manhattan), and sent inside a walled-off zone, a kind of fully-contained Hell on Earth. In this case, it is all of Scotland that is walled-off from modern civilization, not New York, but the concept is virtually identical. 

Once inside, Eden is promptly captured by the denizens of the walled-off, barbaric area (populated either by crazy cannibals or criminals…) and eventually forced into combat for the pleasure of the audience.  

In Escape from New York, Snake battles one of the Duke’s (Isaac Hayes) burly minions in a boxing ring…and wins.  In Doomsday, Eden ends up in a Medieval Castle battling a knight to the death, a minion of Marcus Kane. She also wins.

Similarly, Doomsday ends with Eden releasing footage (from her eye camera…) of political corruption, of the replacement PM talking about trimming the fat from the population, allowing the plague to work through the populace. This leaked footage not only embarrasses him, but destroys his ability to lead.  His administration will fall because of his inhumanity.

This "political humiliation" ending harks back to Escape from New York too. 

There, the President (Donald Pleasence) is embarrassed when he presents the wrong tape at a peace summit, one (from Cabbie) that makes him look like a fool. Snake did this switcheroo for a reason. The President was unable to summon one genuine or sincere word of thanks for those who died in the process of saving him. 

George Miller’s Road Warrior/Mad Max saga is another significant source of inspiration in Doomsday.  

We see it, in particular, in terms of the wardrobe of those living in the Quarantined Zone.  Like Wez in The Road Warrior, many of these individuals wear mohawk hair-cuts and outfits that might politely be termed leather-chic.  

The primary action mode of Miller’s Mad Max saga is vehicular. Weird, modified cars battle it out on the old roads to determine supremacy in the new world. 

Accordingly, the climax of Doomsday occurs on the road, as Eden and her entourage of survivors race from the forces of Sol.  This chase sequence, while not lengthy, is one of the most impressive in the post-apocalyptic milieu, at least outside of Miller's work. 

In case viewers miss the point about pastiche, Doomsday names two of its soldier characters “Carpenter” and “Miller" -- John and George, right? -- just to assure cult-movie fans that it is in on the joke. Doomsday has thus blended the worlds of Snake and Max into one package, and -- not surprisingly -- they fit together pretty well.

In terms of other inspirations, the plague in Scotland might be seen as being  connected -- at least obliquely -- to contaminated London in 28 Days Later (2002).  Or if one goes back to the 1970s, perhaps the infected Los Angeles of The Omega Man (1971). 

Uniquely, at least one important ingredient in Doomsday seems to be piped in from a contemporary war film, and not a post-apocalyptic one. The best and most harrowing scene in the film involves two armored vehicles -- or APCs -- moving into the Quarantine Zone. While Eden and some soldiers go inside a hospital in hopes of retrieving Dr. Kane, others remain safely in the vehicles. 

At least they believe they are safe.  

But Sol’s people lay siege to the moving transports, and -- shockingly -- bring them down in an orchestrated, well-visualized assault.  

The loss of this mobile home base leaves the survivors on the chaotic streets of a failed city-state, surrounded by a population dedicated to killing them.  

This scenario -- the best modern technology overcome by hordes of enemies -- clearly evokes Ridley Scott’s brilliant Black Hawk Down (2001), which involves the bringing down of two American military helicopters in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.  

In both cases, people from "civilization" feel that their technology makes them untouchable.  Then, when their technology is destroyed, they must fight their way out the city on foot, on the run. Meanwhile enemies are literally everywhere...

In its use of “ingredients” from all these films, Doomsday makes for a compelling, action-packed ride, and the level of gore and violence is almost unbelievable at points.  Sean Pertwee, playing Lt. Talbot, meets a horrible fate, and the movie isn’t shy about showing it, point-blank range. He is burned alive on stage, and then eaten by cannibals, who tear the seared flesh from his bones.  I've already cited Romero as a key influence, but the eating scene here is every bit as grotesque as anything you'll find in Dawn of Day of the Dead (1985).

The level of violence in Doomsday is truly stunning and indecorous, but in a way, that’s really the point of all the films I’ve name-checked so far. 

Dawn of the Dead, Escape from New York, Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and even Black Hawk Down concern a world where the laws of man -- as we enjoy them now -- don’t exist, or at least don't hold sway. The best of these films also compare the apparently savage world with the apparently civilized ones...and find that they are not all that different.  

That's Doomsday's point, ultimately.

We see, in such films, that the world is an egregiously violent and corrupt place. To make that world seem real, directors such as Romero and Miller, especially, don’t shy away from depicting brutal, shattering violence.  

This is so that -- as I noted in my review of Fury Road (2015) -- audiences will feel un-tethered while watching, rocked back on their heels. It’s entirely possible that viewers will see something truly disturbing, and feel physical jeopardized while watching one of these films. We thus become, like the characters populating these films, uncertain about what to expect next.

Doomsday pushes the envelope to achieve that vibe, though not always successfully. When it succeeds, it is a stirring film. When it fails, it's just sort of gross.

Other scenes in Doomsday simply don’t work. Malcolm McDowell is wasted by the filmmakers as the sort of Kurtz-ian ruler of a Medieval Castle in the Quarantine Zone, and the overt fantasy visuals associated with his domain feel somewhat out-of-step with the post-apocalyptic and savage scenes in the film.  

Perhaps Marshall was hoping to channel Romero's Knightriders (1981) too?  

Nonetheless, the scenes featuring knights and castles feel entirely disconnected from the rest of the movie, which concerns savage human behavior, both in social interactions and political ones. I would understand if the castle and its surrounding society were meant to represent a nobler, more dignified time in human history.  But the savagery and dangers Eden finds there are just as bad as in the other parts of the Quarantine Zone.

One fresh twist on the material is the casting of Rhona Mitra as our lead character and action hero.  

Post-apocalyptic films (at least before Imperator Furiosa) very rarely focus on female characters, and Marshall makes a play for Mitra’s Eden to stand on the same hallowed firmament as Snake or Max.  

Some scenes in Doomsday nearly accomplish that feat.  

One involves Eden's grace-under-pressure handling of physical abuse during an interrogation scene with Sol.  Another involves her brutal duel with Sol’s girlfriend.  In both these cases, Eden rises to the level of cult-movie hero.

The effort is undone, somewhat, by Marshall’s determination to give Eden a back story. She is a little girl when the film starts, and separated from her mother when the plague hits Glasgow.  So her journey in the Quarantine Zone is also one of self-discovery, of going home.  Snake and Max, by contrast, stand apart from the worlds and characters they meet, which in some way makes them more iconic

Although we know much about Max’s family (and the tragedy surrounding it), he isn’t engaged in some grand quest; rather a series of adventures that inform his character, and lead him toward the ultimate destination of redemption.  

But Eden has a much more stereotypical “hero’s journey” here, going on a quest that humanizes her, but at the expense of mythologizing her, if that makes sense. Max and Snake both come from the Spaghetti Western school of “The Man with No Name.” They are unattached personalities who ride into town to reluctantly save the day...and then they leave.  

Eden is much more emotionally connected to her story. I guess that could be read as a positive or a negative.  For me, it made her more recognizably human and less like a 'Man" (or Woman) with No Name." Eden should be a little more mysterious in my opinion, and not saddled with a pre-packaged history to overcome.

I came away from a viewing of Doomsday with a sense of shock at the violence, and an adrenaline rush.  And that’s, in some sense, the point of many of these movies. 

There were also times, however, I wished the film had more fun with its ingredients, and was willing to go big and mythologize Eden a bit more as a warrior of the wasteland.

In the annals of post-apocalyptic films, there are many, many failures, and just few successes.  

Doomsday utilizes its fine ingredients -- Mad Max, Escape from New York, Dawn of the Dead -- to get closer to the goal post than many, even if it falls a bit short.

Welcome to the Post-Apocalypse: Waterworld (1995)

Sometimes, mainstream film critics focus too much on the inside-baseball aspects of filmmaking for my taste. 

I suppose that everyone enjoys behind-the-scenes stories of disagreements between lead actors and directors, and tales of woe concerning films that run massively and catastrophically over-budget.  

It’s impossible to take your eyes off a train wreck, in other words.

And yet the problem with this focus on inside-baseball emerges when the same critics draw an explicit connection between behind-the-scenes strife and the artistic merits of a finished work-of-art.  In other words, some reviewers utilize the inside-baseball knowledge to fit into a specific, pre-drawn narrative. 

Using the former factors (behind-the-scenes strife), to judge the latter (artistic merit), is problematic, I submit, because the relationship clearly isn’t one-to-one.  A difficult shoot doesn’t necessarily result in a bad film.  Going over budget doesn’t necessarily mean artistic disaster, either.  And the opposite is also true: a smooth shoot doesn’t indicate that a film is going to turn out terrific.

Certainly, this unfortunate critical paradigm was exposed with both King Kong (1976) and John Carter (2012), both of which were received harshly by the critical community largely on the basis of behind-the-scenes, inside-baseball factors rather than a judicious consideration of artistic factors.

This fallacy is also true of Waterworld (1995), a film that, upon release, was clearly marked in the press as a troubled production, and furthermore, the most expensive film of all-time. 

Yet seventeen years later, I don’t know that our knowledge of those facts is vital to a fair assessment of the film’s particular strengths and weaknesses.

Eschewing the inside-baseball stats and figures, Waterworld plays as a straight-up and not un-enjoyable transplant of The Road Warrior (1982) aesthetic, only in a world destroyed by global warming rather than by nuclear war. 

Kevin Costner’s gilled, mutant Mariner, in other words, is a wet Mad Max who, like his predecessor, is something of a variation on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, a classic movie character featured in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). 

In short, this archetype involves a “stranger” who rides into town and becomes involved in a conflict not his own, and who, largely, is rather stoic, allowing actions speak louder than words.  Similarly, Waterworld’s Mariner is frequently tagged as a silent brooder, and by film’s end has even become equated with “Death” Himself for his accomplished – if taciturn -- application of lethal force.

From this...

To this...

To this.

Beyond the obvious inspiration the film draws from the Mad Max mythos, Waterworld succeeds mostly because of the “reality” of the world it assiduously constructs. The film is one of the last sci-fi epics to emerge from the pre-digital age of Hollywood blockbusters and, accordingly -- and for all its apparent flaws -- boasts this heightened sense of texture or verisimilitude. 

Everything (or most everything…) our eyes witness had to be arduously constructed and set afloat, and that herculean effort pays off in a visual and imaginative sense.  You can practically smell the salt water and the burning fuel…

In terms of negatives, Waterworld takes an unnecessary dive into sentimentalism, a wrong turn that The Road Warrior never falls prey to, though Beyond Thunderdome certainly did. 

The film’s final act also consists of one generic action movie trope after the other, from the hero’s ability to outpace blossoming fireballs, to last minute, physically impossible rescues.  These almost cartoon-like moments tend to mark Waterworld as a product of eager-to-please Hollywood, and make it rather decidedly unlike its spare, gritty, Australian source of inspiration.

Still, some of the overt sentimentalism and action clichés in Waterworld might be overlooked because of the film’s absolutely original setting, and the skill with which that setting is presented.  The film’s lead characters -- when not grinding the gears of expected generic conventions -- are interesting enough to spend two hours with, certainly.  In keeping with the tradition of the post-apocalyptic genre, Waterworld also makes an earnest statement about man’s self-destructive nature.

“Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny!”

In a world of the future -- a world of ubiquitous oceans -- the silent, rugged Mariner (Costner) seeks to re-supply at a nearby atoll.  Unfortunately, he is arrested by the local Elders as a “muto” (or mutant) because he has webbed feet and gills behind his ears. 

The Mariner’s arrest comes at a bad time, because the leader of the eco-unfriendly Smokers, The Deacon (Dennis Hopper) is planning to launch an attack there and grab young Enola (Tina Majorino), a girl with an indecipherable map to the mythical “Dry Land” tattooed on her back. 

Enola and her stepmother, Helen (Jean Tripplehorn) free the Mariner from captivity in exchange for passage out of the atoll on his boat.  They barely escape with their lives, and the Deacon commits to pursuing them.

On the high seas, the Mariner and his “guests” have difficulty getting along at first, but soon he becomes fond of the women, and they of him.  One day, the Mariner takes Helen to the bottom of the sea and shows him man’s drowned cities there.  That lost world is the only (formerly) “dry land” he knows of, he insists.

When the Deacon captures Enola, it’s up to the Mariner to rescue her, and more than that, to lead other rag-tag survivors to “Dry Land.”  Enola’s map, properly understood, holds the key to man’s future…

“He doesn't have a name so Death can't find him!”

The quality I admire most about Waterworld is its physicality.

That may not be the best word, but it gets the job done in a pinch.  I could also describe this ingredient as “texture” or “atmosphere,” perhaps, but physicality better gets at the film’s rugged and powerful sense of setting, of place.  I love the Rube-Goldberg-style devices, the trinkets from the “old world” re-purposed for Waterworld’s tech, and the sheer mechanical nature of the world.  It’s a place of whirring hydraulics, tugging pulleys, fold-out sails, and endless, ubiquitous sea.  As a whole, I find it all rather compelling and even believable. 

As I noted above, most of this setting, at least in terms of the human dwellings and conveyances, had to be constructed and then set afloat.  I like the tactility and verisimilitude of this world, and realize that if the film were made today, it would be a different beast all-together, one “rendered” with digital landscapes and CGI.  

In other words, it would likely seem a whole lot less real.  But some of the little, almost throwaway touches in the film are really quite spectacular, and contribute to the idea that "Waterworld" is a real place, and one boasting a deep and long history.

A world that you can touch.

A world that had to be built.

A world that works.

And a world that speaks of another time.

In terms of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, Waterworld  escorts the audience on an ominous trip to the bottom of the sea, and provides a haunting view of an old metropolis turned to dust at the ocean floor, a clear analog for the Statue of Liberty moment in Planet of the Apes (1968) or the “empty cities” of The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959) or Night of The Comet (1984).  But that’s as close to conventional end-of-the-world imagery as Waterworld gets, instead setting its action on an unending, dangerous, but eminently beautiful sea.  I have always been impressed by the visual qualities of the ocean, a realm that is both beautiful and incredible dangerous.  And the ocean, as we detect in the film, also does a good job of burying secrets…

In terms of its narrative, it’s plain that Waterworld owes a great deal to The Road Warrior, and indeed, the entire Mad Max cycle.  The Mariner, like Max, is a man who lives outside of human society and who boasts some disdain for it. 

Both characters live as scavengers and traders, contacting civilization only to re-supply.  Both the Mariner and Max form meaningful relationships or friendships with children (Enola, and the Feral Kid, respectively), and both eventually come around to the idea of “helping” an endangered civilization find a new home (either Dry Land, or the gasoline truck’s promised land destination in The Road Warrior).

Finally, both sagas end with that new home established, but the warrior himself returning to the “wasteland” arena to continue his lonely travels.  Mad Max and the Mariner are violent men with a code of ethics, and so they both realize it is better for them to remain “outcasts” in the wild rather than to seek domesticated lives inside a new culture. In Beyond Thunderdome, the new city-dwellers light candles for the wanderers who haven’t come home; in Waterworld, Enola and Helen watch as the Mariner returns to the sea, the realm that nurtured him.   

In both The Road Warrior and Waterworld, a central scenario depicted is the “siege” of a pre-existing civilization.  Outsiders on a variety of crafts try to “break in” and pillage either Oil City or the Atoll.  The beleaguered city, naturally, fights back, but the walls are breached by attacking vehicles, either flying motorcycles or launched jet skis.  Both cities eventually fall, leading to a dedicated trek to new home. 

These factors -- the siege and the trek – make the films origin stories of a mythic type.  As Aeneas had to flee fallen Troy to found Rome, so do Max and the Mariner lead homeless survivors to greener pastures…literally in the case of Waterworld.

In one moment in Waterworld, we even get a deliberate mirror image composition of a famous frame from The Road Warrior.  There, in the first harrowing action scene, we saw the savage Wez perched on his motorcycle, another goon seated behind him on the bike, looking at his prey.  We see very much the same framing in view here (also in the first action scene), except, of course, on a water craft instead of a motorcycle.

Despite the obvious aping of the Mad Max universe, Waterworld’s unique, water-bound setting gives it a lot of “juice,” at least visually speaking.  The images are so lush and convincing you can make yourself forget, essentially, that the movie is a pastiche.

A city shall fall.

And so will this one.

And a child shall lead the people to a better future.

And so will this one.

The bad guys watch.

And so do these bad guys.

As we have come to expect from post-apocalyptic films, there is an environmental message in Waterworld that suggests man’s self-destructive nature. The “Ancients” caused rapid global warming, and now, similarly, the Smokers are running through the last of their oil, trying to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle. 

Their need to live that life-style of relative leisure (replete with cigarettes, electricity,and even cars…) dooms the Smokers to a life of war and conflict, stealing what they need from other nation-states/atolls at the barrel of a gun.  The fact that the Smokers inhabit the Exxon Valdez, a poster-child for environmental irresponsibility, pretty much says it all.  And this too is America's fate, if we don't tap alternative energy sources.  We'll have to fight resource wars to maintain our culture's high standard of living.

Even the film’s villain plays into this leitmotif.  At one point, the Deacon attempts to flick a lit cigarette into an open oil tank, an act which could have instantaneous, catastrophic results were he successful.  The message is clearly that he is self-destructive, but there’s more.  By wantonly, thoughtlessly using up the Earth’s resources, we’re essentially lighting a spark that could destroy everything we hold dear too. 

“We outgrew it,” one Smoker says of the Exxon-Valdez, and indeed that’s precisely fear of many environmentalists.  What happens when we outgrow the planet’s capacity to sustain us?

This environment message is leavened some by the film’s many action sequences, which grow progressively less satisfying and less convincing as the film continues.  The opening battles on the sea and at the atoll are genuinely awe inspiring, and feature death-defying stunts.  By the end of the film, however, rear-projection and cartoony explosions dominate the proceedings and some element of reality is sacrificed.

So much of the popular press still terms Waterworld a bomb (though it eventually made back its budget and more), but this is hardly a terrible science fiction film. Waterworld may not be a truly great science fiction film, but nor is it the epitome of Hollywood disaster, as many still make it out to be. 

Waterworld’s biggest problem, I submit, is that the film’s first half elaborately sets up a world and characters of tremendous interest, and then the last half spends all its time blowing things up, and resolving all the conflicts with fireballs and explosions.  In other words, it’s lot like many other examples of mainstream 1990s filmmaking.  And yet, the film doesn't open that way at all.  In fact, Waterworld's opening is a kind of brilliant "screw-you" to conventional  standards and decorum.  How many Hollywood blockbusters can you name that open with a shot of an established star, like Costner, pissing into a cup, refining his urine, and then drinking it?

And in terms of last shots, Waterworld finishes strong. The Mariner heads off to the next horizon and the next mystery.  Perhaps it’s the mystery of his very creation, or the mystery of the end of the world.  It’s kind of a shame we never got to see that second adventure. 

After all, Mad Max and The Man with No Man each got three attempts to get the equation right…

Welcome to the Post-Apocalypse: The Book of Eli (2010)

The Book of Eli (2010) is a post-apocalyptic action movie from the visual and thematic tradition of the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as "The Man with No Name." 

Accordingly, the film is set mostly outdoors against a backdrop of Big Sky, and therefore lovely to look upon. One rousing action scene late in the proceedings is positively brimming with visual invention, and proves a real highlight.

In broad terms, the overall production design, the character blocking, the iconic positioning of Eli in the frame, and other visual facets of the drama are truly exemplary, and therefore well worth lauding.

Yet ultimately I feel somewhat conflicted about the film. In emotional, purely human terms, The Book of Eli plays as markedly flat compared to the harrowing The Road (2009), for instance. And most importantly, the deep religious message it conveys is not handled in an appropriately inspiring or nuanced manner.

The Book of Eli is set thirty winters after an unnamed apocalypse in which the sky opens up and burns to a cinder most of the human population. The surviving populations of the world blame this global catastrophe on the Bible (but not the Koran, and not the Talmud, apparently...). Thus all copies of the Bible -- everywhere -- are burned.

Three decades after this terrifying day of disaster, a humble "walker," Eli (Denzel Washington) makes a dangerous pilgrimage West carrying what may be the planet's final Bible in his satchel.

The book in his possession soon lands Eli in direct conflict with a small-time tyrant named Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who believes that ownership of the valuable tome will permit him to control and dominate an unruly population. 

Eli also befriends a young, impressionable slave, Solara (Mila Kunis), who takes up the book's learning with Eli. 

There is a final battle between Eli and Carnegie for possession of the Bible, and the end of the trek occurs at a sort of book repository/monastery on Alcatraz.

There are many truly fine elements at work here. The action sequence I mentioned above is a real humdinger. It finds Eli and Solara hiding in an isolated house in a western desert as Carnegie and his goons attack, utilizing superior firepower. 

The camera lunges back and forth between Eli's position and Carnegie's position, but eschews all conventional film cutting. Instead, (under the auspices of some amazing CGI...) we travel "through" bullet holes, race along the battlefield floor, pivot suddenly and zoom in the other direction, sometimes even through carnage and fiery debris. This is a dazzling and fresh way of visualizing a gunfight, and it's fluid, fun and exciting.

As a film buff, I also appreciated the plethora of touches here that appear purposefully reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" feature films (which in turn, I suppose, are purposefully reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo).

Eli may possess a name, but like his Spaghetti Western predecessor, he boasts a personal code in a mostly immoral terrain... and is a highly-skilled fighter, proficient, in particular, with a sword.

Remember in Yojimbo how Mifune's ronin chopped off the arm of an opponent with his sword? Early on, The Book of Eli presents a similarly violent sequence.

And like The Man with No Name, Eli is a fellow who brooks no nonsense from anyone, and is a loner, an outsider in the culture around him. He ignores or skirts reigning authority, and again like Eastwood's character, seems to be more than a mere mortal. Just as The Man with No Name survived hanging (twice...), so does Eli seem to endure and survive extreme physical challenges (like gunfights and a battle with a chainsaw-wielding opponent). Although Eli is joined by Solara, he gets no substantive help from the community that he ultimately helps.

So clearly, Eli is a heroic archetype, one perfectly in keeping with the Western and Samurai/ronin traditions he arises from. To accentuate this important connection to cinematic heroes of the past, the Hughes Brothers frequently shoot Denzel Washington from below, or in iconic silhouette to accentuate his power, virtue and strength. 

A variation on this idea involves a focus on the eyes. When you think of Leone's pictures, one of the first images that leaps to mind is a close-up of Eastwood's steely, penetrating orbs. In purposeful contrast, Washington's eyes are shielded almost constantly by opaque sun-glasses, to make way for a final act surprise twist. But the sub-text of the warrior's sight is part and parcel of both "The Man with No Name films" and The Book of Eli.

Post-apocalyptic films have re-purposed Westerns before (The Road Warrior was Shane, wasn't it?) and The Book of Eli picks a very good, very efficacious model to emulate in these classic Italian genre films. This Hughes Bros. movie also seems to acknowledge its myriad post-apocalyptic genre roots, especially with the prominence in one frame of a poster from the 1975 film A Boy and His Dog.

I also noted some real similarities between The Book of Eli and the 1936 H.G. Wells' penned film Things to Come, particularly the section of that classic movie involving "Everytown" in 1966-1967, post-apocalypse. In that middle-portion of Things to Come, Ralph Richardson's petty tyrant "The Boss" dominated a local population as a Dark Age for humanity loomed, and he even had a female squeeze at his side. Oldman and Jennifer Beals play similar roles here, in a comparable setting and situation.

Interestingly, however, ideology has changed dramatically from Things to Come in 1936 to The Book of Eli in 2010. In Things to Come, John Massey arrived from a pacifist socialist organization "Wings over the World," which almost literally forced a global government and New World Order on Richardson's tyrant and his warring people. Eli, by contrast, is a kind of fundamentalist missionary re-asserting the tenets of Christianity in a world where morality has largely vanished.

Another commendable element of The Book of Eli involves a useful, real-life historical analogy: the book-preserving souls on Alcatraz led by Malcolm McDowell are highly reminiscent of the Irish Monks, who, in the Dark Ages, took it upon themselves to preserve the literary treasures of Antiquity. 

Without their tireless and truly amazing efforts, much of humanity's greatest works would have been lost to the barbarism of the day. In The Book of Eli, another Dark Ages is broached, and the same thing occurs: human ingenuity is championed. Encoded here, then, is a worthwhile message about literature and books: that they hold the legacy and promise of the human race.

Even the broad religious message of The Book of Eli is eminently worthwhile. Simply put, the movie states that some people view religious belief as a method of control (Carnegie) and some see it as an authentic road to salvation and redemption (Eli). I appreciated the even-handedness of such a take; the yin-and-yang of the approach.

But then...there's this other aspect of the film that I found just didn't quite work for me. And yes, it involves Eli and the overtly religious aspect of his heroic quest. In crafting an interesting variation of "The Man with No Name" character, the makers of the film have gone too far for my taste. They've made Eli, actually, superhuman.

One of the most jarring and incongruous aspects of The Book of Eli is the style of fighting adopted by Eli during the frequent clashes. This is a malnourished, tired, ragged character adorned in layers of ratty clothes...and yet he moves at super-human speeds, as though a well-fed, highly-trained, agile martial artist. 

There's another handicap at work too that would seem to preclude such precise fighting movements. I get what the movie is trying to do; to offer a Christian, post-apocalyptc version of Eastwood's character, but Eli is very clearly God-Powered.

He's a Holy Warrior whose very quest is blessed by the attention of the Almighty Himself. At one point, he recounts a story that God spoke to him directly as a child, and instructed him to take the Bible out west.

Helpfully, God has thus made Eli virtually invulnerable in his ability to evade bullets, and fulfill his holy purpose. In one shoot-out set on a busy city street (another sequence taken right from the Western genre...), a half-dozen or so men open fire on Eli with blazing pistols. He is so confident in his continued survival that he does not even take cover. He just walks away in the middle of the wide open avenue, his back to the bad guys, as they shoot at him. And, he survives, without a scratch.

Even Eli's enemies perceive that he is, well, specially...endowed. One of Carnegie's minions states, in hushed tones: "It's like he's protected somehow. Like nothing can touch him."

Too often, alas, that's the level of nuance and subtlety at work. The ambiguity of the "Man with No Names" films is sacrificed for this modification in the format, and I submit it's a near-fatal subtraction from the formula.

I should specify. As intelligent and yes, even spiritual viewers, we are not asked by The Book of Eli to contemplate the notion that God could be guiding this battle, or Eli's very destiny. Rather we are told, in no uncertain terms, and in fight after fight, sequence after sequence, that the Almighty has got Eli's back. And I feel very strongly that this takes much of the suspense and intrigue out of the film.

Put another way, it's the difference between believing God exists and is possibly affecting outcomes and destinies, and the definitive knowledge that God is, well, perched on the third cloud from the right, micromanaging our affairs with a cosmic  i-Pad. 

What I'm saying is that God may be a mystery (even the Greatest of All Mysteries...) but this movie negates that mystery, spoon-feeding the audience easy answers. Not only is Eli righteous, he is literally on a mission from God, to quote The Blues Brothers.

We have no such certainty about the Divine in life, so why make God's presence and agenda so certain, so uninspiring in the movie? 

I mean, that's what faith is all about, isn't it? The belief that God is present even though we can't get text him, message him or e-mail him, right? If God is constantly our dutiful co-pilot, as is suggested in the film, then faith is actually moot. Who needs belief and faith when you know for sure that bullets can't touch you?
But here's the considerable problem the movie's approach opens up: if God can deliver messages directly to Eli, and render Eli virtually impervious to all but point-blank bullet wounds, he can surely just materialize the Bible on Alcatraz, right? Or, God could have prevented all the Bibles from being burned in the first place if he disapproved of that particular outcome.

In fact, the "history of the world" as depicted in The Book of Eli is baffling and contradictory. There's a global disaster, and we're led to believe that every surviving American -- even those living in the Bible Belt, burned their Bibles in response. There must be hundreds of millions of such Bibles in this country...and all but one of 'em get torched. Yet, as I noted above, the Koran and the Talmud both survive.

We can extrapolate from this oddity in the story that the survivors don't blame a "God" figure for their suffering, but specifically, a Christian God. Why else take out the anger on the Bible, and not the other religious books? 

And see, this nugget of information leads to even more problems. If everyone in the post-apocalyptic future has so thoroughly rejected the Bible, how is brandishing one going to grant the despotic Carnegie total control over his citizens?

Now, the people of this future era may be young and naive and living in a world without books, but it was their parents who burned the Bibles, so wouldn't they have at least some knowledge of it? If, as a parent, you deemed Christianity and the Bible responsible for the wholesale destruction of the Earth, so much so that you had to go on a book-burning tear, wouldn't you also, you know, tell your children: beware, these beliefs destroyed the planet?

On another tangent, if every Bible on the Earth were indeed burned, wasn't this God's plan too? And if Christianity really was the cause of the destruction of the planet, why would Eli want to re-introduce the very thing that hundreds of millions of people -- even in the Bible Belt, even devout Christians -- massively assessed responsible for the destruction of the planet?

In short, The Book of Eli wants to be a movie about how the world needs more Christianity in it. Yet by the movie's own storytelling details, Christianity is apparently what destroyed the world in the first place. There's a whopping narrative contradiction there. 

Scrape the surface of The Book of Eli and you detect how the narrative details don't make a lick of common sense. A spiritual movie is wonderful, but I would submit that a spiritual movie must work even harder to tell its story in a fashion that conforms to the tenets of our consensus reality. God doesn't erect actual protective force fields around those he loves, does he? We experience the Divine (if we see the Divine at all) in the little human truths, in an unexpected moment of grace, in the innocence and love of children, etc. That's an approach I would have preferred; one with a sense of nuance and subtlety.

But The Book of Eli's approach to religion is unnecessarily broad, and too unambiguous. The movie wants to be about the mystery of faith, but it is so obvious, so callow, so crushing in its depiction of the world, that it actually obliterates the necessity of faith.

This would have been a far stronger (and much more inspiring...) film if it had concerned a man struggling with, and ultimately re-affirming his faith. As it is, the movie is about a man with rock solid certainty that God has spoken to him directly, and who is never challenged in that belief. Eli begins and ends the movie as a Holy Warrior. He doesn't grow, he doesn't change, he doesn't evolve. He never even wavers.

It's a creative and imaginative idea to make the archetypal Man with No Name a religious crusader. I just wish The Book of Eli had tread more deeply into the mysteries and profundity of belief and faith instead of presenting certainties that we, as humans, just don't receive on this troubled, mortal coil. It takes the fun out of an action film to know that God is intervening on one side, and that the result of a war is already decided.

Eli's book is never opened to us, the audience. It's slammed shut before we get to read the first page for ourselves.

But golly, the cover of that book sure makes the story look terrific.