The Book of Eli (2010) movie

Denzel Washington stars in the 2010 post-apocalyptic movie The Book of Eli. His character Eli, a former Kmart employee, is protecting a book with information that can assist in the rebuilding of civilization, at least that of the nuclear war devastated United States through which he's been traveling for three decades. The book is The Book, a King James Bible. Traveling alone he encounters bandits a la the Australian post-apocalyptic trilogy movies Mad Max and a warlord (Gary Oldman) who's been looking for his own copy of the Bible so he can use it as a weapon to control more minds and places.

There's an unusual twist at the movie's end, so I won't spoil it by giving away the finish, but there is hope for humanity, ironically found in Alcatrez Prison on an island with a ravaged San Francisco landscape for a backdrop.

One of my criticisms of the movie is that given the level of bomb damage, it seems unlikely that anyone would even still be alive or that individuals such as Eli or Oldman's character, whose name is Carnegie, would not have succumbed to radiation sickness long before. In a voiceover Eli indicated that survivors had spent up to a year underground after the war.

As the movie opens we see what appears to be a kind of nuclear snowstorm falling, at least that was my interpretation, and Eli's character is there in a gas mask with no other protection other than his clothes. A while later and he's out of this forest and into a desert-like landscape.

One interesting thing is that although there are young people around, we see very few children. In one poignant scene in the town controlled by Carnegie that Eli visits, a shopkeeper asks him if he has any toys with which to barter the recharging of his portable long-life battery that powers Eli's iPod.

It's also odd that there's virtually no vegetation and we also see no evidence of underground or indoor farming activities, so just how and where are all these people getting their essential food groups? Given the level of violence in the film and the several hints and mentions of cannibalism, I was surprised not to see anyone munching on human flesh, something we see plenty of in horror films, especially of the zombie variety.