Following the appearance at Comic-Con of a brand new poster, the trailer for Denzel Washington’s post-apocalyptic actioner
The Book of Eli has now also surfaced.
Released on 15 January 2010,
Eli counts its star and Joel Silver among the named producers, while
Menace II Society and
From Hell directorial duo the Hughes Brothers are the designated megaphone wielders.
Although the trailer is every bit as light-saturated and special effects-garlanded as one has come to expect the modern action movie to be, there also appears to be a smidgeon of retroactivity at work, with the depicted future wasteland being a throwback to the type of
A Boy and his Dog and
Mad Max territory that we all thought had been unceremoniously killed off by Kevin Costner’s
The Postman ten years ago.
Aside from Denzel’s Eli looking mean and moody while roaming a devastated spaghetti junction, the bulk of the movie’s action revolves around chief meanie Carnegie (Gary Oldman) trying to get his dastardly paws on the titular tome - a book which supposedly contains the pearls of wisdom which can drag civilisation up by its ragged bootstraps.
With a screenplay by British video games journalist and comic book scribe Gary Whitta,
The Book of Eli also features Mila Kunis, Michael Gambon and the original stripping welder herself, Jennifer Beals.
The Book of Eli doesn’t exactly look ground-breaking, but Washington and Oldman are usually pretty solid performers, adding extra value to otherwise unremarkable fare. The action might benefit from the seeming relative straightforwardness of both the post-WWIII setting and oppositional storyline, while there remains the possibility for a few neat reveals from the pages of the mysterious book itself.
Sources:
Empire,
News in Film 
August 14, 2008, 10:14:54 PM
