The Book of Eli/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Wouldn't a braille edition of the Bible take up a couple of shelves whole bookshelf? The thick paper required and the fact that only 27 characters (five or six words) can fit on a standard 8-1/2 inch row is a bit of an issue.
    • No.
    • Yes! Maybe some can willingly suspend their disbelief on this point, but my dad is blind and he used to have an entire braille Bible. It DID take up a whole bookshelf. The book of Genesis alone was its own volume, and each volume was enormous...the size of a coffee-table book, and about four inches thick.
    • Well that and there was a person on the main page that had a good point. Considering that Eli has the whole Bible memorized, he might just be carrying around a single volume of the Bible because that's what he uses to remind himself of his mission.
      • Or God's doing another one of His famous suspensions of the laws of physics and probability. Divine inspiration and such.
  • There already is a New King James Version.
    • It still counts. The curator, even if he entirely trusted Eli's memorization, still would have had to note this change. (Or, Eli's version could have been a NKJV all along, and the curator recognized it.) Also, no one cares.
    • So Eli's edition was a KJV, not an NKJV. It could have been a NRSV or a NIV or one of many versions, but it was a King James version. Perfectly possible.
    • I thought they were only pointing out that the version he had was the New James King Version. Why would they call his version new anyway?
      • I don't quite follow this one. The original complaint is that at the end, the Bible is titled as the "New King James Version" on the spine.
      • Oh, sorry. I've only seen the movie once; I didn't remember that. Well... spin some WMG about this being the distant past and history got some things wrong?...
        • I'm not quite sure how that would work, but I just wanted to note that I didn't see the movie more than once, either.
      • The New King James Version is a real translation of the Bible; you can get it in any bookstore. Furthermore, when Eli began dictating it, the text he was dictating really was from the NKJV, the same NJKV you can find anywhere. He was not dictating the KJV, which is a bit different. Eli's edition was ALWAYS an NKJV and that's why it was labelled as such by the curator.
        • To put it simply, Eli meant the New King James Bible; he probably either made a mistake, or just omitted the "New" bit for quickness.
  • Are there no Korans, Torahs, Books of Mormon, LOTR books, or Odysseys in the town? It seemed like a fairly big town, and the library should contain other religious/cultural books.
    • If by "town," you mean Carnegie's, apparently not, as he burns all books that aren't The Bible. If by "town," you mean the colony where Eli and Solara end up, a Qu'ran and Torah can be seen on the shelf at the end.
    • I always figured it was because the bible is the most free and loving of the religious books. If you lived in a post-apocalyptic world would you rather have to get on your knees five times a day to get to heaven, or just say a single sentence some point in your life before you die?
      • You must not know much about the Bible OR the Koran.
      • ^This. SECONDED. As a Christian who has an interest in understanding other religions, BOTH of those stereotypes are insulting.
      • I'm... pretty sure that's not the basis of the Bible. At any rate, I can't see Carnegie taking that route if he wants to use it to take over people's lives. I think the main reason is the first response -- The Bible was the big book before the Flash, Carnegie knew it, and so he didn't see any value whatsoever in anything else, even the Quran, the Torah, or anything else that wasn't the Bible. (Actually, that kind of makes sense -- not only did he plan to turn the Bible itself into a tool of raw power, but he didn't want his people getting exposed to anything else. Or maybe I'm overthinking it.)
  • Okay, may be I am a total idiot but - is it necessary to be blind to read braille? Cause even after I watched the movie I didn't realize that the hero was blind. I thought that he just developed a very good skill of reading braille. So now I am a little... surprised by this revelation.
    • Nope. Hell, Eli can see, but really, really, really, really, really poorly.
    • You're not alone in not realizing he was supposed to be blind. This troper felt like the Butt Monkey after going online and learning he was pretty much the only person out there who failed to notice this surprise. I thought the "twist" was that the last remaining Bible on Earth happened to be a braille version, thus rendering it useless to Gary Oldman, but didn't matter to Denzel because he had memorized it in its entirety. It never occurred to me that Denzel could be blind after witnessing all the spectacular feats he performs during the movie, but I guess it's possible that he was guided, as the movie implies, and there are subtle clues that he is in fact blind throughout the length of the movie. This is the kind of film that plays with your expectations and demands a second viewing, so don't feel bad if you don't understand everything the first time through.
    • Watching it a second time. Maybe Denzel didn't know the twist for some of the scenes, but in other scenes it's subtle. But what is the root of his, what appears to be, degenerative blindness? 'The Flash' or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choroideremia?
    • Quite frankly, if you didn't already know how to read, or know a really specialized skill, you probably didn't have a lot of time to learn after the world was destroyed. Especially since books at all were apparently rare.
    • Have we considered the possibility that Eli wasn't blind until he got to Alcatraz? Maybe the "protection" that helped him survive all those gunshot wounds also cured his blindness during his mission. When he reached his goal, the protection faded, his blindness returned, and he eventually succumbed to his wounds.
  • Is this troper the only one who sees how freakin' valuable Eli's iPod is? I mean, the movie makes it pretty clear that most of the population was wiped out, most books and art are gone, and any remnants of culture from before the war is quickly dying. That iPod contains one of the most powerful expressions of culture and zeitgeist that has ever existed: music.
    • Or, alternatively, it could be full of the complete Ke$ha discography, a selected medley of Jethro Tull B-Sides and a copy of the Numa Numa song. Some zeitgeist.
      • Has at least Johnny Cash on it, that's worth keeping. Still we can assume that the people at Alcatraz copied the contents somehow.
  • Didn't the writers realize there's more than one translation of the Bible? Or the fact that the KJV doesn't have all the books that are canon? There's quite a few books in Catholic bibles that aren't in many Protestant versions of the Bible, including the KJV.
    • What about them? Eli's may be one of the few Bibles left, and beggars can't be choosers.
    • Depending on your sect, exactly what parts of the Bible are and aren't Canon vary. Saying that the King James version is missing canon portions is like saying that a person's life is non-canon because he was born in Australia instead of Great Britain.
    • The fact that they go out of their way to name it the King James Version (or New King James, if you want to get technical) pretty much demonstrates that yes, the writers knew.
  • Why did they travel during the day? I just wondered at one point - great big burning sun during the day and a loooong walking mission why didn't he travel at night while it was cool/cold/freezing and walking warms you up?
    • It looked like a great big burning sun but I don't recall anyone talking about how hot it was. It could have been winter, if all the multiple layers of clothing everyone is wearing is anything to go by.
    • A) Cinematic reasons. B) Eli's got no choice, not to mention he probably "sees" better during day. He could have been walking day and night when we first see him decide to take a break at a house.
  • The death, this troper knows we were supposed to see it as a peaceful rest, now that his mission was done. But, there was no reason for it. It wasn't even Redemption equals Death. It was more like success equals Death. I know he was an old man for his world but the way it was filmed it was less "I've fulfilled my mission, now I can die happy" and more "You're reward for carrying God across the desert is getting your divine protection withdrawn five minutes after you stop serving."
    • Pretty much, actually. Remember, he got gutshot. Plus, he's got someone else to carry on his mission.
    • Indeed, he was already dying from the moment Carnegie shot him. God kept him going long enough to complete his mission. And he was able to die peacefully, which in the Fallout Book of Eli Universe, is rare. And he's in Heaven, which is pretty good too.
    • For a Christian, which it's heavily implied Eli was, this is actually a pretty good deal: fulfill your purpose on Earth, then die and leave the filthy hellhole behind.
  • How is Eli able to fight so well while blind? The melee battles are somewhat justified (he's had thirty years to practice, after all) but the gunfights are harder to excuse. Still, very few people complain because it's awesome. And you don't know about it the first time through.
    • He could be legally blind, not able to perceive depth or even see everything really blurry. It explains why he doesn't see Alcatraz until they're practically in front of it.
    • The way I interpreted it, he is only completely blind in his right eye, the one with the scar over it. His left eye just has poor vision, which makes more sense with the gunfights and such.
      • He also never fires first, and can smell people thirty feet away.
      • It's probably easier to hear gunshots and a guy staggering across the dirt than to pinpoint their smell.
      • This troper took it to mean he really is divinely guided. Not in all actions, as he does for himself what he can, but when necessary, IE: blowing away people shooting at him with a pistol some 20 yards away with a single shot after they shoot at him. With the light handed way in which the movie delivers its biblical messages, such as, "God helps those who help themselves". Could count as more fridge brilliance.
        • Just a little bug-a-boo of mine: The "God helps those who help themselves" is one of those misappropriated quotes. That one's actually an old saying and is not in any version of the Bible.
        • Remember, he was using three to four shots per head in that gun fight in the town. It could be that with guns, most people just don't have the markmanship skills, Eli included. He's just really quick on the draw.
        • It was more obvious in a movie theater with high quality surround sound but if you watch (and listen) closely you can tell that Eli is shooting at the sound of his attackers.
        • He used sound of their gunshots coupled with echolocation. Notice how every time he is confronted you hear him making "clucking" or "clicking" sound with his tongue? Other Wiki
        • More evidence that he was, in fact blind: When he goes to the house with the cannibals, he walks right past a "No Trespassing" sign, then says he didn't see it. Also, for the first machete fight, he takes a step backward so that the fight takes place under a darkened bridge, taking aways some of the advantage sighted people would have over a blind person.
  • Do you know what bugs me? That this movie was Fallout with Fundamentalism mixed in.The world has ended and the BEST book to save is the Bible?Really?No history of science?No the complete history of the World,What about Adam Smith? Plato? And, no the collection in the end does NOT compensate, actually that makes it worse, because we didn't see a movie about any of these book we saw a movie about the Bible. Oh and by the way, I agree with Carnegie, that book would be a tremendous advantage for conquering because it has already used for that countless times. And the Torah and Quran. Really, I hate book burning, but if 2-3 books have destroyed the whole planet in the wrong hands again and again, I would at least lock them up,somewhere really really safe. NO REPRINT THEM AND START PREACHING AGAIN!
    • Because clearly countries have never been conquered through knowledge of chemistry or biology.
    • The idea of Democracy was used to initiate a reign of terror in Athens in the past. It is the nature of things that grant people hope to be maipulated by the greedy in order to attain power
    • Finding out that the oh so important book was the Bible and not something actually useful to a post-apocalyptic society, like a book on medicine or agriculture, killed any desire I had to see this movie.
      • Except the harsher UV rays from the hole in the Ozone layer would probably make old knowledge about agriculture less useful and it's not like a book on medicine is gonna help when you're in the middle of the desert with a bullet in your head. Rather, I think they chose the Bible because they wanted to highlight the importance of faith when all hope seems lost.
    • The Bible's a culturally important work and worth preserving.
    • The movie makes it very clear at the end that the group at Alcatraz are all about spreading information, not faiths. If Eli had had anything else, it would have been just as precious to them. Being a religious text made the majority of the movie's plot, or was the farmhouse fight not worth Carnegie going after a book that could be used to influence others by faith?
    • Uh... Eli isn't perfect, and Carnegie could have used it for bad. THERE ISN'T A PARABLE THAT'S SIMILAR TO ELI'S.
    • Someone's Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.
    • Talk about Hollywood Atheist.
    • Whoever said it was the "best" book to save? There's only a few characters who even know what it is, and of those Eli himself is a believer and certainly wouldn't agree that the Bible is evil, Carnegie WANTS to use it for evil, and the librarian at the end clearly does NOT see it as THE one book, but one out of many.
    • Can someone tell me when Just Bugs Me became an excuse to start spewing hate speech?
      • I think it became that way when the one for Family Guy was created.
  • How in the shit is there only ONE copy of the best selling book of all time, ever? I mean, even if the world's largest religious faction suddenly lost faith, I'm certain that SOMEONE is going to have a copy.
    • That's the same as asking how 6 million people can suddenly start being shipped into furnaces and ghettoes. Systematic elimination is possible with persistence and time, and religion is a touchy subject. Isn't there at least one Real Life example of a highly populated secular nation that at one time pretty much eradicated religion from its borders?
      • No, no there is not. such a thing would be utterly impossible. A few have tried, and failed with varying degrees of magnitude.
        • In 1978, some bans were lifted and the present day equilibrium 32 years later is less than 20% in a time of peace. The banning of Chick Tracts and other materials as acts of sedition in the past, exclusion of the Koran from the Olympic grounds in more modern times, and the continuing policy of outlawing and quashing any would-be religion that isn't "well-established" seems like a pretty long-lasting success that has seen even better(?) days in time gone by.
    • Remember that our scope is seriously limited. We're looking at a world with no major inter-regional communication, except for Eli's traveling. We basically have to take Eli at his word that his is the only copy, but he's a blind man with no news from Europe, Africa, or South America. Even if he is divinely guided, we see that he doesn't need a physical copy of the book to finish his mission, so he might not have been pointed toward other copies.
    • Also remember that even aside from the book burnings, there may still be bibles around but are not useable because they are heavily damaged, missing pages, got used for a cooking fire, got stained, crumbled into dust, and so forth. Books can be pretty fragile if not preserved properly.
    • No. This is the single most unbelievable part of the film - I can accept the blind man with Improbable Aiming Skills verging on Disability Superpower, I can accept the braille Bible the size of the Concise OED, I can accept a man turning down sex with Mila Kunis. But the idea that, in America of all places, there was a successful purge of every Bible in existence is a step too far. The way I saw it, there probably are lots of surviving copies, but (a) the owners are the people who guarded and hid them most carefully, of whom Eli is the first to decide that it's time to spread the word again; (b) we only see a few characters in a small area of the country, and they haven't been able to find one within the distance they can feasibly travel with limited fuel, and (c) people have generally forgotten about religion and literacy, so aren't aware of all the other texts that would do the trick. However, when it's revealed that the library project hasn't turned up a single copy, that really strains credulity.
      • Bingo, man. You cannot tell me that every single Motel 6 with a pair of Gideon's freebie New Testaments in the nightstands was wiped clean, especially not in the Bible Belt.
    • Firstly, nuclear armageddon probably went a long way towards destroying a lot of copies of the Bible, and most books (which are pretty rare). Second, it could just be that its not to be taken literally, and others do exist that just haven't been found yet. How organized the purge of bibles was might be a factor too, and the lack of modern communications might have made it harder for believers to get the Word out that their books needed saving, or more likely the believers might just have hid them better. And those not got by the purge might have decomposed; all books are rare, after all, not just this one.
  • Umm..isn't Tanak (which is shown on the same shelf that Eli's book is placed upon)also 77% of what Eli's dictated? And if it survived,why didn't the B****?
    • You mean the Torah? Yes. For the most part, it's the Old Testament with, I believe, added texts that were written after Christianity branched off. Still good to have the New Testament around.
      • The Torah contains the five books of Moses which encompass the laws and customs of Judiasm given to Moses by G-d on Mount Sinai. The Haf Tarah, a complete and separate scroll, contains the material comprising what is commonly referred to as the Old Testament. Portions of both of these texts are read during a typical Jewish Service.
    • The Torah is not the entire Old Testament. It's just the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, and Leviticus. Further, Alcatraz's version of the Torah is likely a different translation from the NKJV of the Bible that Eli dictates.
    • No, he meant the Tanach, (It's two books to the left of the Kings James Bible in that last scene) which stands for Torah, Nvuim, Ktuvim. It contains the Torah (the first five books of Moses), the eleven books of the Prophets and the five megillot. These are also considered the Old Testament of the Bible, although they were adapted with some alterations.
  • is it just me, or was Gary Oldman doing his best Ian McShane impression for this movie? Not much of a complaint as I like both actors, but when I look back on any given scene, I keep picturing McShane in Oldman's place.
    • Interesting. I can see why someone would think that, given the similarities between Oldman's office above the bar in this movie compared to McShane's office above the saloon in Deadwood. However, to me it seemed like Oldman was doing a more toned down less campy version of some of the previous bad guys he has played. Specifically, Zorg and Detective Stansfield, from The Fifth Element and The Professional. Both of which predate Deadwood.
  • Is it me or will Carnegie's town wind up worse than it was now that there's no authority keeping people in line? When he's looking out onto his bar being looted, we see a guard tied up and hanging by his ankles from the ceiling, the bartender dead and all of Carnegie's hookers are trying in vain to fight off some would-be rapists. Inferred Holocaust on a miniature level, perhaps?
    • We're only seeing the very beginning of the looting, in one bar, with only a medium group of people. We can't be sure what the situation is for the rest of the town. But either way, the town is always a living hell and women were constantly pimped/raped anyway; at least now these people have some chance to make something better for themselves.
    • Well, when it's one mortal man's will (and his hired muscle) that keeps the order, why should anyone stay orderly after he loses his power? Alternatively and less cynically, there are usually riots when a power structure collapses, and "payback" issued to the deposed leader's hangers-on; the "party" will eventually get boring and people will settle back down, but the enraged must, well, rage.
  • I'm quite sure why it happened, but I want to be sure: Did the second bullet that Carnegie's dragon shot actually Bounce off the back of Eli's head? Cause Divine Protection is one thing, but that would be awesome.
    • You have to have a keen eye, but you can see the bullet barely (we're talking millimetres) misses him, and instead tears a hold in his hoodie.
  • Why would frequent consumption of human flesh cause your hands to shake? Isn't human meat pretty much the same as any other meat?
    • It's Truth in Television. Other animals can eat our flesh with no problem, but human cannibalism results in degenerative brain disease.
      • Yes, but why? I thought that human meat was nutritionally the same as pork.
      • It may be worth pointing out that it can result in degenerative brain disease - it is quite possible to eat people and not suffer from transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (or from other diseases - other than the whole ethical and ickiness things, the big problem with eating humans is that there is no need for any disease in the food to jump species barriers, it already being in the same species). They almost certainly do not have kuru, anyway (it never got off Papua New Guinea), but they might well have, for example, eaten someone with Creutzfelt-Jakob disease.
  • Can't start a religion without a Bible? What, did the nuclear war zap imaginations as well?
    • I think the idea is that while Carnegie knew how to keep his goons in line, he didn't have the charisma to inspire people and he knew it. With a Bible, however, he'd actually have something substantive to back him up.
    • Also it is strongly implied that Carnegie is a lapsed Christian himself. While he wants the book primarily for power, he probably wants a bible specifically because of the impression it once made on him. Even when he's dying and he can't use it for what he wants, he still wants to hear it, an almost Luciferian lament for the glory of God that he turned his back on.
  • Wouldn't post-war people just burn every religious text, just in case? Right now, many Westerners think that the Qur'an may be the problem thanks to the Muslim extremists. Based on the level of technology and the remains we can see, it doesn't look like the war happened in the far future but around this time.
    • Isn't that exactly what they did, but missed one?
      • Exactly, which made Eli's text so valuable...
      • I just don't think it would happen. Too many people would save them. I'm not a very religious person, but I could never destroy a bible, or the Kuran for that matter.
      • Yeah okay you save one but then you die/your house collapses so nobody knows where it is and it's exposed to the elements; do you really think it'll still be in good condition? Then the people that are activity looking for the books want to destroy them, and people that come after probably can't even read, let alone figure out the importance of such texts, and use it as fuel for a fire.

Did we all forget about technology?

    • The guy has a freaking iPod! He could have recorded the whole bible to it as an audio file.
    • The guy has a freaking iPod! He could have saved a text file on it with the whole Christian, Jewish and Muslim canons(not showing preference, just alphabetical order.) Probably even Buddhist and Shinto and so on if it was 60GB.
    • The guy has a freaking iPod! And he walked across the country...and never found a laptop?
    • He actually can't stand Al Green, he just can't upload any new songs...
    • The guy has a freaking iPod! ... he has to deal with the DRM.
    • The guy has a freaking iPod!--that breaks down and runs out of battery juice, with no certainty that either can be remedied.
    • The guy has a freaking iPod!- that in all probability he only found recently, for the reason above. Plus he doesn't have the tech to upload anything else onto it (even if he found a laptop, the Internet is down and there is no electricity to power either, so unless the computer already has both batteries and happens to have the texts he's looking for, it would be pretty useless; plus he's nearly-blind, so he also won't be able to see what he's doing, and he might have walked by dozens of them without noticing).
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Eli/Headscratchers?oldid=1984776"