The Book of Eli Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis Director: the Hughes brothers
Religion is a taboo topic in film these days. While there was a time when the Biblical epic was an actual sub-genre and every studio picture had an undercurrent of Christian values deeply embedded into them, times have changed.
Which makes The Book of Eli such a strange beast. Its trailer (included here as an extra) sells it as another post-apocalyptic action flick. A no-holds-barred ravaged future with a desert samurai roaming our sunburned planet, harking back to the cult classic days of The Road Warrior.
For the most part, that's what we're served. Denzel Washington takes the lead, our titular hero on an unnamed journey to deliver a sought-after book to 'the west'. Gary Oldman is an iron-fisted town warlord, out to use its knowledge for manipulation and misdeeds.
It's the classic western: good versus evil, with a strong peppering of brutal machete-fight sequences thrown in for entertainment's sake. And beneath all this ugliness is a sense of visual beauty: wide-angle shots of sprawling white-sand landscapes, sepia-toned sunsets filmed in stunning clarity, all alluding to a tale of Biblical proportions.
And therein lies the trouble - it's a film most likely funded by zealots out to convert ignorant filmgoers. It feels like, to put it bluntly, Christian propaganda.