The Book of Eli

[NowhereMan]

Dianetics and at the end he gets to meet Tom Cruise.

[jason]

About the whole "walking for 30 years" bit... I know its meta and not in the movie at all, but the braille King James Bible comes in 18 volumes.  Since he was only carting around one, you could infer that he spent a great deal of time wherever he found the bible (rubble of a school for the blind?), reading and memorizing it because he couldn't possibly carry 18 volumes around in his backpack, and only started walking when it got down to the last one.  But I've been told that since that isn't in the movie, it can't have happened.

[HaemishM]

Finally got to see this on DVD the other day. I loved it. The logistical bits didn't bother me that much. You kind of have to take with a grain of salt the "only Bible left in the world" line. For all Oldman's character knows, it IS the only Bible in the world. Seeing as how his world is restricted to how far he can walk or drive, and maybe a few hundred miles beyond that from word of mouth or passing travelers, I'm sure he might actually have thought it was the last Bible in the world. Without worldwide communication and travel, the world gets very small to most people. The only complaints I had about the movie were that the last scene with Oldman in the bar was totally unnecessary - we already knew his little empire would collapse eventually based on his failure to get a Bible he could read, we didn't need to see it. The fact that Kunis and Denzel made it to San Fran on whatever gas was in the car when Oldman turned back from fear of running out of gas was a bit of a stretch, but acceptable. The action set piece in the cannibal's house was fucking fantastic though, well worth watching the whole movie just for that.

[shiznitz]

About the whole "walking for 30 years" bit... I know its meta and not in the movie at all, but the braille King James Bible comes in 18 volumes.  Since he was only carting around one, you could infer that he spent a great deal of time wherever he found the bible (rubble of a school for the blind?), reading and memorizing it because he couldn't possibly carry 18 volumes around in his backpack, and only started walking when it got down to the last one.  But I've been told that since that isn't in the movie, it can't have happened.

Watched this last night. The way I justified this issue is that the guy was a holy vessel.  He was only carrying the first few books of the Bible with him but when he got to where he was supposed to be, God delivered it all through him.   I did not figure him as blind until I was "supposed" to, but then thinking back to a few early scenes I liked how it was hinted. 

[Samwise]

I think if you're trying to figure out how he fit a Braille bible in one volume you're thinking about it too hard.  Figure that the moviegoing public and probably the scriptwriters do not know much about Braille and have no reason to suspect that a Braille book would need to be 18 times the size of a normally printed book.  And then tell yourself "a wizard did it".

But if you really want a scientific explanation, how's this: with a decent compression algorithm you can probably squish the text in a Bible down to 1/18th of its original size, data-wise.  So say it's not just a Braille bible, but a gzip'd Braille Bible, and Eli is a mathematical savant who can uncompress it in his head.

[Merusk]

It was an ultra evangelical's right-wing bible.  It didn't need all that hippy-dippy love-thy-neighbor crap, the psalms and things that contradict itself.  Duh. 

[DraconianOne]

Watched this over the weekend finally. Fight scenes were best bit of it - and I did like the farmhouse stand off with Dumbledore and his missus even if it was a pretentious bit of "Hey, I know, let's make it seem like we did it in one take!"  There were several shots which just reeked of "Look at us! We're being really clever!" which pulled me out of it a bit.

Unfortunately, the rest of it was dull as ditchwater and the whole "voices in my head" thing really didn't work for me. Nor did the twist at the end. Gary Oldman made the best of a poorly written part.

I also shouldn't have watched this the night after seeing "The Road".

[Slyfeind]

Oh man, that was Dumbledore? I totally forgot he was in that movie. Awesome!