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Rating: Imagine the desert.
The silence of eternity confined in a split second. What would you think if this lay before you with no surrender? To which saint would you pray (assuming there are any left)? Imagine finding hope in a book. And what a "book": a bible. Pure blasphemy for those who feed on blasphemy, pure conformism for those who hate it. Imagine a journey as long as an entire continent, flattened by every concrete form of life, corroded by a radioactive sun, and supercharged by the explosion of 2000 simultaneous greenhouse effects.
Imagine yourself there, among those dunes scorched by the eternal summer of a world that knows no winters, much less human compassion.
"The Book Of Eli" is as close as, in my deplorable opinion, contemporary cinema (in the temporal sense, not artistically speaking) has produced in the last 10 years. Above, I tried to gather, striving to concentrate the whole essence, the soul of a film in which we can forget about "folks" like Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, and Tom Waits (all three, to say the least, magistral, for performances, character, and expressive cadence). Allow me to say it, with utmost frankness: during the screening, I turned my gaze away from the faces! And I say this without shame, without presumptive pseudo-analytical self-reference, and if you'll allow me this last Gallicism, without "bullshit"!
Finally, after shamefully celebrated attempts in the recent (very avatar-like) past, a movie with Photography.
And What a Photography!
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a film. Neither is it a "western," as Oldman himself stated during a long and delightful interview I more than praised, related to the "making of" this feature film.
My dear post-apocalyptic readers, this, is the future!
Photographed, filtered, painted, and polluted, our miserable mass of rocks and water that is planet Earth.
Eli (Denzel Washington) as a corroded Charon of the new millennium, will transport you through it, across desolate lands of pure human absence, bucolic philo-primitive violence, unbridled cannibalism tendencies, and even more, unbridled existential/introspective quest.
Through an unrecognizable, flattened America, he will face the adverse hardships of hunger (the real one), thirst (the equally real one), filth, and infection, forging his way through limitless spaces and lack of morals at the neutrinic state. His goal, the multi-savage West, where "cowboys" practice torture, employ Panzerfausts and armored cars, raiding unchecked in honor of the God of Nothingness.
Through this cadaverous mash (more stripes than stars), the central theme of the film: the eternal, damned, stuttering as much as deformed, struggle between good (that done by the weak and handicapped) and evil (that done by the foolish, mean, and opportunists). All without appropriating any arbitrary end, a concept thanks to which a Bible becomes a true, real, credible, ultra-symbolic spiritual object, and (incredibly enough!) indispensable.
Praise to the Hughes brothers, who decided to exploit a production barely concluded by a miracle. Respects to Atticus Ross, whose "Panoramic" is ruining my nights, mornings, and sunsets. Honor to Washington himself, who believed in the film so much he even invested his own money!
In conclusion.
Believers or not, psalmists or otherwise, this film burns with radioactive energy, with its own heat, with a mysterious warmth mixed with sand.
I seem to see myself, walking in a San Francisco marred by post-atomic decades.
I seem to perceive the nauseating aroma of human flesh along lost highways forgotten by memory.
I seem to feel it, the stinking odor of that bar where Eli asks for a drink and receives a hit.
I seem to hear it: the world of tomorrow.
A boundless, immoral desert cemetery.
The future that all of us feel whispering from our minds..
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