Book of Eli packs surprises

We went to see the movie, The Book of Eli, yesterday, and were pleasantly surprised.  We had expected it to be another Mad Max type full of violence and human degradation.  I don't usually like futuristic movies that depict such a horrible future for mankind since I think God has more control over our world than that, but we went anyway.

It had moments of violence but wasn't too gory, and Densel Washington is always enjoyable to watch.  In fact, one big fight was a silhouette of the fighters, and supposedly, Densel did his own fight scenes.

What I liked about the movie was the good v. evil conflict:  spirit v. ego, God v. Satan, righteousness v. animalistic tendancies.  The story began with the wandering of Eli heading west, proclaiming he had heard a voice in his head to do this, and he was following the voice's instruction, believing this voice to be God.  He had a mission to protect a very important book, which he did against many trials and tribulations.  He met a myriad of nasty people who had no inkling of humanity, but Densel was able to fight them all off and proceed on his quest. 

Along the way, he met a young girl who escaped her situation and followed Eli, learning from him along the way.  This whole story may seem to be quite predictable, but the surprises in it fooled us, and we are very good at anticipating and guessing outcomes of movies.  We totally missed this one, and we walked out of the theater actually feeling good and talking about it.  That's how Chuck and I judge movies:  if it is memorable enough to talk about it afterwards and if it makes us feel good, then we consider it to be a good movie.

I'm not going to give away any more.  What I've written you can view on the trailer, but this is one movie that I highly recommend seeing.  It was an excellent story line with, obviously, top of the line acting.