A review of the movie The Book of Eli from a Christian perspective.
Movie Title: The Book of Eli
Rating: R
Director: The Hughes Brothers
Starring: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman; Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson and Jennifer Beals
Category: Drama, Action
Moms of Faith Rating: 5 out of 10
Introduction: I usually try to avoid R-rated movies. However, I also want to review Moms of Faith movies so readers are informed…within reason.
Review: What surprised me the most was that the main character, Eli, the main “Christian” in the film, was not portrayed as a complete wacko. He was a decent guy and he didn’t quote the Word lightly. He was on a “mission from God” to get the “book”, which is actually the ONLY copy of the Bible left on earth, to safety…somewhere in the west.
Along his journey we see many not so nice things…
It seems that the world has gone through a terrible war… and it has. 30 years of Eli walking and all the debris is still out there. Man has gone mad and many have become cannibals. Fortunately, we never see anyone eating people. LOL!
However, there is a LOT of violence in this movie. We’ll get to that in a minute.
I was disappointed in a scene in the movie where Eli allowed a woman to be raped and murdered. I could have stopped it. He kept saying “stay on the road, it’s none of your business” over and over again. As if she was having an internal struggle to leave her to a grim fate. Sadly, he left her. 🙁
However, later in the film, he realizes that although God gave him the mission to bring the book to safety, he had not lived what he was learning. So, we see him come to understanding. We also see him show kindness and even teach a young woman to pray before eating.
Did these scenes make all the violence in the movie easier to digest? NO.
On the negative side: The film has an excess of violence. I would not recommend it for children at all. It’s rated R for a reason. While the rape of the woman Eli left behind is not actually seen…and a subsequent rape is stopped, there is still a lot of emotion, screaming, crying and fear that occurs during the scenes, which was difficult for me to watch and listen to. a.
There was a lot of brutality, murder, and just unnecessary violence in the movie. So much for it to ever find a place on my shelf.
Speaking of the shelf, at the end of the movie, when the book’s contents are where they should be, we see it placed on a shelf between the Torah and the Koran. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It was as if it became another “great piece of literature”.
There was also quite a bit of wear and tear. A dozen “F” words, half a dozen “S” words, followed by a few minor ones and even a “GD” or two.
Conclusion: I was sad that this movie never mentioned Jesus. He is after all the center of the Christian faith. And I’m not sure why, or what it was about the movie that didn’t sit well with me. Not that it was all that bad… It just had an open ending and I felt the story was incomplete… at the end I was left dry.