The Book of Mad Max I Am Legend Omega Man
dir: The Hughes Brothers
2010
Another week, another post-apocalyptic flick gets released, meant to chastise humanity for their brutish, selfish ways and profit from our desire for self-destruction. There are so many of these post-apoc flicks coming out that you’d think humanity is obsessed with its own end or something.
Or, alternately, that screenwriters have very limited imaginations.
Hot on the heels of that other mega-blockbuster The Road, which no-one saw, and those that did promptly committed suicide (or at least thought about it a whole hell of a horrible lot), comes another flick where a barren earth plays host to the last scrambling remnants of humanity.
The great difference here, though, is that this is meant to be more fun.
Sure, life on the desiccated plains is desolate, short, brutish and Hobbsian, and cannibalism and general viciousness abounds, but, unlike the dead Earth of The Road, there is some hope here for the species' survival. And that hope travels in the form of a man called Eli (Denzel Washington), who walks West, carrying a book.
Not just any book, but The Book.
You know the one. It mentions the world being created in six days, and some guy called Jeebus being nailed to a cross, and something about an apocalypse where most of us heathen scumbags will die horribly painful deaths.
Eli himself is a calm, even quiet, man who walks with a purpose, a long machete, and a still-working iPod. He doesn’t seek trouble, but the scum prey on everyone, even on people they clearly shouldn’t fuck with. So though he gives ample warning to those who would try to take his stuff and eat him, they press on despite the fact that he’s clearly some kind of incredible samurai or something.
That’s the thing about post-apoc scenarios that I think attracts audiences and writers: mostly they’re just revamped Westerns, and the lawlessness, and the lone gunslinger stuff, is what really appeals. People, as with the wild west, or vicariously as well through gangster flicks, fantasise about how they would act when all bets are off and all the laws generally governing human behaviour are suspended or completely discarded.
The people of this world vary from being completely monstrous rapists and cannibals, to being very suspicious, and, in the case of the women folk, completely naïve. Of course it falls on our hero to show all these shmucks the error of their ways, through his soft spoken ways and his mad killing skills.
Though the idea that the written word, seeing as it is the distillation, the condensation of civilisation into its purest symbolic form, is the one thing staving off the descent into total barbarity is not a new idea (hello Canticle for Leibowitz et al), it certainly gets a lot of play here too. The initial difference is that the religious word, specifically the Christian religious Word, is seen as being one of the most important elements of society that need to be retained in order to safeguard humanity from oblivion. The problem, for our hero especially, is that whilst Eli feels he has a divinely-inspired mission to protect the good book from the fires that claimed every other copy, others want the book, like the many rulers of the past, in order to control the remaining dirty people.
Eli comes to the attention of a town boss called Carnegie (Gary Oldman, in a very evil and cadaverous turn), who, upon hearing some quotes from the long ago, becomes convinced that Eli possesses that which he desires the most. Though he has a complete, brutal grip over his town already, he envisages a strategy whereby, through using the power of the words contained in the bible, he will be able to enslave greater regions by convincing people that not only should they do what he says out of fear, but because God and Jesus commands them to do it, too.
What a wicked schemer. He’d make a perfect pope. After Rodrigo Borgia or Baldassare Cossa, two of the more unbelievable but real villainous popes of actual Earth history, Gary Oldman as this character would probably be a step up.
In this iteration of the post-apoc scenario, enough time has passed from the cause of civilisation’s collapse that younger people (up to the age of around thirty) have barely any knowledge of the time before, and thus know none of the joys of juice makers, stick mags, video-on-demand or tamagotchis. They also know nothing of religion, literacy, currency (everything is barter) or hygiene. Only the oldest of folks, like Eli, like Carnegie, and like Tom Waits as some kind of tinkerer, know anything about anything. The rest are like Oprah’s loyal viewers or drunk teenage girls: clueless and very open to suggestion.
Age has its privileges, but Eli doesn’t seem to want to take advantage of them. When an initially calm and munificent Carnegie is trying to figure out if the lethal Eli has The Book he’s been searching for, he sends along a young indentured servant (Mila Kunis) to sleep her way into his good graces. Of course Eli (and Denzel) doesn’t want to be accused of being a race traitor, so he demurs, pretending to do so on religious grounds, because of his divine Calling. But there are probably plenty of other good reasons not to do so. I can’t think of what they might be right now, but there must be some.
Is Eli a mad prophet, is he a heavenly-inspired and protected mystic warrior on behalf of the Christian God, is the Hand of God in evidence, as in The Stand, or is he just some loon with a sword, who's very good at slicing and dicing anyone who fucks with him? Well, it’s not like I’m going to completely spoil everything. He is a character that’s not entirely new in these settings, but he’s not entirely generic either. He’s very much different from the usual Denzel character only in that he doesn’t scream at the top of his lungs at any stage. And when he’s badass, he’s a total badass without needing to raise his voice above a whisper.
As a post-apocalyptic scenario, it’s believable enough, though it certainly tends more towards the Fallout / Max Max version of the nuclear hereafter (as a harrowing but still ‘fun’, survivable place, rather than the utterly doomed cold dead planet of The Road. And whilst I enjoyed it more than The Road (and didn’t find it anywhere near as depressing, or because I didn’t find it anywhere near as depressing), it’s not really as grim or serious a flick. Sure, humanity as depicted in both is as vile and vicious, but here it’s in the service of a somewhat less nihilistic but also less urgent message: that as long as people have something to believe in, humanity will be okay even after its almost total destruction.
It’s a cheerier message, for sure, but that makes it less powerful as well. The importance of the book is almost mocked, I thought, at the end, by the number of twists involved in safeguarding The Book, and the manner in which it ultimately plays out (with great irony, I would say, as it reaches a certain denouement on an island just in sight of the Golden Gate Bridge).
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In the end the flick isn’t about some deep religious themes or the salvation of humanity, is it, really? It’s about Denzel playing a badass who fucks up bad guys and cannibals in a very old school way. He’s also a deadeye shot with the firearms as well as the swords, but damn does he look good doing so. The Hughes Brothers can probably be praised, as they haven’t been worthy of praise in a very long time, for making an actual enjoyable and watchable film (the last good one they made was American Pimp, because From Hell, Dead Presidents and, I would argue, Menace II Society were never good flicks to begin with). The look is right, they stop Denzel from overacting, and they get decent performances from nearly everyone else involved, including Oldman, and the thoroughly awesome Ray Stevenson as the only one of Carnegie’s henchman who possesses a personality.
About the only missteps, I would have thought, involved giving work to Malcolm McDowell, who doesn’t need more work, and putting a Mad Professor fright wig on him; the use of cars (for which there was no explanation as to how they could be working thirty years after the ‘flash’, since petrol doesn’t last two years unused, tyres don’t last that long without falling apart blah blah literal blah); the blatant plug for Apple through iPod, which everyone knows don’t last more than two – three years, let alone three decades (C’mon Jobs, those fucking batteries don’t last through a gentle spring shower, let alone a fucking nuclear holocaust). But elsewhere I think they got stuff right, like Eli’s fighting style, people being on the look out for cannibals by seeing if they had the Creutzfeldt-Jakob shakes, which was a nice little touch, and the final revelation about Eli and The Book, which was wry indeed. I can see people going berserk about it as if it was the latest shite movie put out by M. Night Shyamalan, but because I’m very familiar with a long running set of Japanese movies about a certain chap who traipses across Tokugawa Shogunate-era Japan getting into adventures and chopping up attackers with his mad sword skills, the twist didn’t bug me at all.
As I said, I can see it reducing some people to quivering piles of jelly-like rage.
I liked it, though, even as a godless heathen, and I thought the soundtrack - music worked well in the scheme of things. Denzel’s performance isn’t going to be awarded or lauded, but I thought he did pretty well with the closest he’ll ever get to a superhero (not counting Malcolm X), especially now that he’s getting on in years.
It’s certainly worth a drunken look on DVD, especially if you like these kinds of settings. And let’s face it: everyone except little girls likes post-apocalyptic scenarios, and the only reason they don’t is because of the distinct and absolute lack of ponies.
7 ways Mila Kunis isn't believable as any kind of person in any timeframe, though at least she can now tell people she's worked with Denzel Washington out of 10,
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“Cursed is the ground because of you, both thistles and thorns it shall grow for you, for you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Author! Author! – The Book of Eli
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