engineer

The movie "The Book of Eli" was interesting. Faulty as well in many regards, but interesting. I do not regret seeing it, especially at discount theater prices.

The chief reason I had wanted to see it though, was the reaction I had seen from the Christian community. And hearing that the script/movie had to be scrubbed a bit of some of its Christianity. Yesterday I made the mistake of calling it a Christian movie prior to seeing it, which I immediately regretted even prior to watching the movie. What I had meant to say was that it dabbled in some exploration of Christianity from what I had heard, and after seeing the movie I would still say that is a better clarification. It is not a Christian movie. It unfortunately suffers from some of the common problems of a Christian movie however. That being having a point they want to make and driving to that at the expense of the story and plotting and character motivations.

Still, some of the ideas floating around in the movie were interesting, as well as the foundational concept was compelling. The execution was a bit fluid though as mentioned. There was good, mediocre, and bad. Mostly mediocre and a bit of bad. There was one stretch of highly important dialogue that brought to mind a script I wrote in college for my sound workshop class; a script I also had to perform, record, and present in front of class. The fact that the movie's dialogue brought this to mind is not a compliment in any fashion. There were some other headshaking stereotypical moments, the combat was too over the top to my tastes (I am a bit weird in those tastes however), some bland acting (There were points where I could see Mila Kunis thinking through her acting. Though she was obviously not in the movie to act, perhaps I am expecting too much. I've seen worse, but she was not good.), a rather blatant Children of Men parallel I was surprised they left in, and more. Oh and there was a touch to the ending to throw a bit of Universalism in, of course.

The movie is also violent, has forced swearing, and some suggested nastiness. There is much worse out there, but I feel this should be mentioned to make sure people are not surprised by the content after looking into it for the ideas I am mentioning.

All of this, but I still would like to say that the movie was an interesting look at the power of the Word of God and revelation. I would have liked to have read the original script. I am thinking between the screenwriter, the directors, the producer (Joel Silver... shudder) there were a lot of different points of view getting thrown into this thing. Perhaps they actually made it better. I do not know. The movie either needed more refining or had been refined too much already.

Oh and Tom Waits was in the movie. That's a +1.