Devastation Double Bill - The Road and Book of Eli reviews

I love a good "end of the world" movie. Whether it is a zombie apocalypse, nuclear war, plague, George W Bush Presidency (admit it, we came pretty close), etc I love them all. It doesn't matter to me if they are reasonably sensible like The Day After TV mini-series, inventive like 28 Days Later or flat out hokum such as The Core, I usually watch them with my brain turned off waiting to see how humanity will survive. So when I saw that both The Road and The Book of Eli were available on Blu-Ray, I snatched them up and had a mini-endoftheworldathon. Here is what I thought of each picture. As always, I'll try to avoid spoilers, but reader beware.

The Road.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kody Smit-McFee, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Robert Duval. Directed by John Hillcoat. I have told friends before that the book The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, is possibly my favorite book of the past decade. It was a devastatingly bleak novel and, overall, the movie stays pretty faithful to the novel.

This is NOT a happy disaster movie. This is not one where Bruce Willis saves us all by blowing himself and the asteroid up. It is a very bleak look at what life might be like about a dozen years after (what we assume is) a world war. Things are extremely bleak. Food is short, water is poison and needs to be boiled, many people have resorted to cannibalism to survive, etc. Things look hopeless.

Through this world walks "The Man" (played by Viggo) and "The Boy" (Smit-McPhee). The Man is taking his son down the road to reach the ocean in the hopes that things will be better. Along the way they meet the good and the bad, played by folks like Duval, Pearce and more. We also learn why the Man and Boy are alone and what happened to, I guess, The Mom (played by Theron in a role much larger than in the novel). The movie stays otherwise true to the novel with encounters and happenings as written by the author.

This is a good film, despite how drained it leaves you at the end of the film. Mortensen is, as usual, very good as the Man who's entire world is keeping his son alive. Smit-McPhee is innocent and someone you want to take care of yourself. And, as I said, the world is chaos. Fires rage, cannibals hunt, earthquakes knock over dead forests, and through all this, The Man and The Boy travel down The Road. Definitely worth seeing as long as you can stand the path is. If you are looking for something in a slightly lighter vein there is always...

The Book of Eli
Starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson and Jennifer Beals. Directed by The Hughes Brothers. Now, I say this is "slightly lighter" than the Road, but don't think that makes this much easier. Whereas The Road is a story of survival, The Book of Eli is the story of a man on a Mission.

Washington plays Eli, a combination preacher and warrior monk who is on a road of his own. Eli has the titular Book in his possession and he has been told by an internal voice (maybe God?) that he has to take it West. As he walks down the road he shows off his lightning fast, brutal survival skills against a biker gang intent on robbing him. This is not some gentle traveller, this is a defender of his task.

Eventually, Eli arrives in a town ran by Carnegie, played by the always impressive Gary Oldman. Carnegie and his right hand man Redridge (Stevenson) have been on the look out for the Book, using roving gangs to rob and murder other travellers seeking it. Also in town is the attractive (and far too naive for the circumstances) water girl played by Kunis and her blind mom played by Beals. As you can expect, Carnegie wants the book, Eli doesn't want to give it up, Kunis is drawn to the mysterious stranger and leaves town with him, gunfights, heads do roll, battle for the book and a rather nifty outcome.

I liked this more than I expected to. Rotten Tomatoes only rated this at 47%, but I would rate it closer to around 75%. The general story was straight forward and sensible. Washington and Oldman are two of the finest actors in the business today and do a good job here. Kunis is, as I mentioned, too naive but is good in her role. There are also a number of cameos from folks like Michael Gambon, Tom Waits and Malcolm McDowell. There are also nice details to post-apocalyptic life and a few shout outs to other "disaster movies" like the poster hanging on the wall of Eli's room for A Boy and His Dog. This is a pretty fun movie that I'd like to say more about, but there are some pretty important spoilers here that you should see for yourself.

Overall, I recommend both movies. As film, I think The Road is a better movie and it is certainly bleaker, but both provide enjoyable viewing and make me happy that the end of the world hasn't happened around here. Yet.