Everything about this write up is spoilery. Hell, even the title of this article is spoilery if you are geeky enough to be familiar with both 2010’s The Book Of Eli and the enormous series of Japanese films from the 1960s and 1970s featuring a wandering swordsman named Zatoichi.
Many will question my choice to “spend” one of my Cinapse Pick of the Week slots (which I’ve now just rebranded as an editorial altogether) on a Hughes Brothers directed, Denzel Washington-starring apocalyptic action film which was received with mixed critical response and has made nary a dent on our cultural consciousness since. But I want to note a number of elements which make The Book Of Eli stand out as a flawed but ambitious piece of entertainment worthy of reevaluation.
First off, there’s really no question whatsoever that The Book Of Eli is a samurai film. Much like American Westerns inspired Japanese samurai films, so Eli completes the circle. Set in an American west which is covered in the hot, dirty wind of an ill-defined apocalypse, Eli brandishes a sword, espouses a code of honor, and wanders always west… duty bound on a quest from his Master.
It immediately throws people off that Eli’s master is the Judeo-Christian God. And perhaps rightly so. We’ve got more than enough reason to be uncomfortable these days with a hero who claims to be guided by a spiritual force, especially a hero who engages in violence. But The Book Of Eli’s screenwriter Gary Whitta (attached to write an upcoming Star Wars entry, and a tried and true “one of us” type nerd) builds a fairly defined world in which to tell Eli’s story of a mission from God. Whatever caused this apocalypse is undisclosed, but it becomes clear that religion was blamed and holy books the world over were burned and now religion and even any sense of the former world’s technology has been all but forgotten by the mostly youthful population left on the planet. In this world, Eli is an old man, forcing himself to disengage from humanity in order to carry his “mysterious” book west, as the voice is guiding him to do.
This book isn’t so mysterious at all, and that is another element which seemed to throw audiences of when they saw Eli. Of course it is a Bible. And audiences everywhere felt the need to congratulate themselves on guessing this “twist” and being smarter than the movie, when in fact, the film has many more secrets to reveal than that. Believed to be the last Bible on Earth, Eli will sacrifice his humanity to protect it, and the villainous Carnegie (Gary Oldman) will stop at nothing to use its “power” to rule the wasteland.
So the presence of God in the context of this movie immediately raises a lot of eyebrows, and turns a large contingent of people right off. But regardless of what you believe personally, I’d argue that God’s presence in the film is sound in its internal logic, and if you have no desire to engage in a story suggesting the existence of God, you could simply flip a switch and think of God as The Force or The Matrix, and continue on the journey west.
The Book Of Eli features countless incredible action sequences. On par with some of the most critically acclaimed action movies of the past decade. Shot with style, assurance, long unbroken takes, and largely featuring Denzel himself in all of the sword and gun melees, I’d argue that the smattering of action set pieces timed perfectly throughout the film are reason enough to check it out. Seriously: Watching Denzel step into the shadow of a dilapidated highway overpass to dispatch of a small crowd of raiders in a single take silhouette is about as cool a fight scene as I could ever ask for. Or the massive gun battle outside of a farmhouse where the camera flies back and forth between Carnegie’s army and Eli’s small cadre of survivors (courtesy of DP Don Burgess, Spider-man) is energetic and creative in a way that most gun battles never even strive for.
But again, these action sequences seemed to be routinely rejected by audiences for one astounding and spoilery reason: At the end of the film, and I mean at the very end, it is revealed that Eli has been blind for the entire duration of the movie. A blind, wandering samurai who happens upon a town, gets involved in helping the innocents there, and ultimately has to fight the corrupt powers before he can continue westward (into the sunset). Yes, all the way at the end of the movie, it is revealed that not only is The Book Of Eli a samurai film, but it is in fact a Western, twist-filled Zatoichi remake. We here at Cinapse have written extensively about the wandering blind swordsman who is unknown to most US filmgoers today, but who is perhaps one of cinema’s all time greatest heroes. And when we covered every single one of those films this past year, I couldn’t shake the desire to write about The Book Of Eli.
When the multiple twists occur at the end of the film, Eli’s blindness only being one of them, I found myself in a unique place of appreciating every element of the movie, even when many audience members found themselves shaking their heads in frustration, perhaps feeling cheated, or at the very least feeling smarter than the film they were watching. If Eli was blind all along, how could he have won all those gun fights? How did he navigate the roads and find his way alone in the wasteland? It feels a little far fetched.
And to be sure, the film’s ability to navigate this twist is not perfect. Upon multiple repeat viewings, Denzel appears to be regularly using his eyes in the way a sighted person would just as many times as he appears to touch and sense things like perhaps a blind person would. However, I believe that the movie ultimately sells its twists for two main reasons. The first and most important is the screenplay’s handling of God. In this movie, there is very clearly a God. He HAS spoken to Eli, and Eli is on His mission. Regardless of whether one thinks this is bogus or not, it works in much the same way that being inside of The Matrix does cinematically. Eli is able to do miraculous (and excellently staged and shot) things with swords and guns because his abilities are supernatural. Plain and simple. Just like how Keanu could learn Kung Fu via a three second program download to his brain.
So at this point, the reveal of Eli’s blindness is giving me goosebumps because the script has given me everything I need to buy in, AND I adore the implications it casts on all the earlier sequences. It is as though this guy we’ve been watching is twice as badass as he was before because he was straight jackin’ fools while totally blind. Then, when I’m already feeling those goosebumps and thinking back to all the moments I saw earlier in the film, the realization dawns on me that The Hughes Brothers and Gary Whitta, along with star and producer Denzel Washington, have secretly resurrected my beloved Blind Swordsman Zatoichi and made him into a Western hero that can only be talked about in whispers behind the protection of a spoiler warning… because this is a secret Zatoichi.
I’ve outlined a number of hurdles that The Book Of Eli asks the everyday viewer to jump through in order to fully enjoy the film. And perhaps Eli was never going to please a wide swath of filmgoers who either get turned off by the religious elements, the violence, the mixture of both, or who simply felt cheated by a twist that didn’t work for them. But I’ve also outlined the clear reasons why the twists and turns of The Book Of Eli work like a charm on me, and why I think they actually do succeed as a twist that doesn’t cancel out or devalue any of the rest of the film with its revelations.
God’s portrayal in The Book Of Eli is interesting, because He seems to be continuing in His infuriatingly mysterious ways. Like, if He really does exist, why allow the world to be destroyed, and all of the copies of His word to be burned? Why let it come down to his one guy carrying the last copy of The Bible to somewhere out West where it’ll be re-integrated into a budding new society? Those are the kinds of questions that beg to be thought about after the credits role, and which Whitta isn’t obliged to answer in the runtime of the film. The Book Of Eli does leave some questions unanswered, and they are the best kinds of questions.
The Zatoichi comparison isn’t a perfect one, being that Ichi was truly a wanderer, with no specific destination in mind. Zatoichi is perhaps more of a masterless ronin, whereas Eli is a samurai. And since Ichi’s blindness is known to all, there’s a dynamic throughout the series of his being underestimated by his opponents. Eli is treated as a threat throughout, though perhaps occasionally underestimated simply due to being alone against a sea of villains. And where Ichi is playful and energetic, Eli’s grave task has made him cold. Regardless of these variations, I believe Eli still fits into the Zatoichi mold, and serves as a much more fascinating western remake of the character than the fun but silly Blind Fury (starring Rutger Hauer, 1989), which I’d also like to cover someday on Cinapse just to get every last ounce of Zatoichi writing out of my system that I possibly can.
The Book Of Eli may ask audiences to jump through a few hoops. And it may just be that I happened to be the perfect audience for those hoops. As a person of faith who wrestles with God as much as I take solace in Him, the film’s portrayal of God intrigued and engaged me. And then my geek-dar just shot through the stratosphere when the Zatoichi revelation hit me. It may never hit you in quite the same way, but I do encourage a re-watch of The Book Of Eli with some of these arguments in mind. Or after you’ve checked out a Zatoichi movie or two.
And I’m Out.