Apocalypse again

In the future, 30 years after the apocalypse, there will be no food, no water, no books. But there will be plenty of sunglasses, because sunglasses are cool. And there will be randomly placed smoke machines, because smoke is cool. And everyone will walk in slow motion, because nothing is cooler than slow motion.

In other words, in the future, 30 years after the apocalypse, life will be like a music video.

“The Book of Eli” is just the latest in a long line of “Road Warrior” rip-offs, using a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape as an excuse to film juicy violence and gore. But it is more objectionable than most, because its pretensions are so cynically removed from its obvious purpose. On the surface, it makes a big show of being about the salvation found within Christianity. But in reality, it is just a film about limbs being severed and blood spewing prettily from the stumps.

That’s kind of the opposite of Christianity, especially when it is the Christ figure himself who is doing most of the severing. It is true that he only kills people who are actively trying to hurt him or had hurt him in the recent past and are no longer capable of hurting him, but because the character is essentially immortal his actions amount pretty much to murder.

The Christ figure, known mostly as The Walker but whose name turns out to be Eli, is played by Denzel Washington (if you question whether he is a Christ figure, check out the lightning when he is essentially crucified). Eli has in his possession the only extant copy of the Bible, all the other versions having been burned after the nuclear holocaust. Ever since the war ended, he has been walking toward the west with this bible, knowing only that he must deliver it somewhere and trusting to faith that he will know where.

Time to do the math: The continental U.S. is about 3,000 miles across. Eli has been walking for 30 years. If he started at the easternmost point and winds up at the westernmost, he is averaging just 100 miles a year. Even given the obvious problems of crossing mountains, that’s just 482 yards a day, a little more than a quarter of a mile. If he walks 12 hours a day, he’s going a less-than-blistering 12 yards an hour.

It must be all that slow motion.

Along the way, he picks up a beautiful protégé, played by Mila Kunis, and a villain, played almost inevitably by Gary Oldman. Oldman’s character is, along with Eli, just about the only person left in the world who reads, and one of the few who knows what the Bible is. He craves the sole remaining copy, not for its power of redemption but to use as a weapon to capture the hearts and minds of the illiterate hordes and use them to do his evil bidding.

So the movie is both pro-religion and anti-religion. Ordinarily, this is the sort of logical paradox that would sink a movie. But writer Gary Whitta refuses to be bothered by notions of logic. If it fits his narrative to have two people walking much faster than other characters can drive, so be it. If he needs another character to be simultaneously east and west of the same town, that’s fine, too.

The whole mess has been directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made such a splash 17 years ago with their derivative “Menace II Society.” Two or three few forgettable movies later, they are back with a big star and a lot of computer effects, to little intelligent purpose. For reasons we will never know (other than they think it looks cool), the whole thing has been filmed in a palette of various shades of mud.

How apropos.