An epic of Biblical proportions

Only one Bible is left in the world and Gary Oldman's villain is after it in The Book of Eli, writes Gerard Wright.

Gary Oldman is an Englishman living out his years in Los Angeles, since it's easier to get to work that way.

His has become a familiar face and character: ageless, over the top and ubiquitous. To see yourself on the big screen, year after year, can lead to a certain suspension of disbelief, and that may have caught Oldman unawares one day last year.

He was shuffling through his darkened house, in everyday clothes and slippers, and caught a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror. It showed a middle-aged man moving slowly across the glass.

For Oldman, 52, the moment of recognition came with a start.

"That's me!" he said, surprised and rueful, a change of pace from his usual avuncularity.

He holds court at the head of a table for this particular publicity event, good- humoured and absolutely engaged. He likes this stuff, or maybe he is just a good actor.

In The Book of Eli, Oldman is Carnegie, manipulative and unmistakable, a bad guy drawn directly from the bottomless Oldman well of villainy.

"People say, 'Why are you always the bad guy? Why do you always play the villain?'

"And people think that's what you're like in real life, I guess: 'Scary Gary'. But I'm not."

In this case, however, he is back in form in The Book of Eli, a post- apocalyptic road-action movie. The story follows Eli (Denzel Washington), a man with unshakeable faith, as he tries to protect the only known copy of the Bible in a lawless world.

Two very distinct elements are in play here. One is water: possession of it is the currency that sets Oldman's Carnegie apart from the rest of the struggling survivors. The other is the Good Book, carried by Eli.

Carnegie has the first and desires the second, for what he perceives as the control it will give. Although set in the future, it is a battle with a profound sense of latter-day resonance, as director Allen Hughes acknowledges.

"You take the title and try to speak to those yearnings in society right now," he says. "It could have been the Torah or the Koran. The Bible is just more . . . commercial."

The odd thing about end-of-the-world movies is that there is such an appetite for them: from the over-the-top effects of 2012, to the relentlessly downbeat The Road, to The Book of Eli and Legion, the latter two released within a month of each other in the United States.

The Book of Eli and Legion embrace the more literal-minded end of the fundamentalist religious spectrum, with the former's not-so-subliminal billboards and posters - "Religion is Power", "Deliver Us", "Believe in Hope" among them - full of references to the apocalyptic end and times that are a part of those teachings.

The Hughes brothers - Allen and Albert - worked in tandem on The Book of Eli, their first feature film in nine years, since From Hell. Allen, with a familiar, outspoken manner, is the people person, "down in the trenches with you", as Oldman puts it. Albert, who lives in Prague, is the tech guy.

What they imagined, from debutant scriptwriter Gary Whitta's creation, was something like Mad Max with gospel overtones. It was Denzel Washington as Max, the lone warrior and the last upstanding man in an upended world.

"They can say, 'That's our man', Hughes says of any religiously inclined audience. "It's not pandering to Christians. It's not a Christian movie, but they need a guy who shows what they believe in."

Oldman is king in this new world, one of the last who can still read, an educated man trying to impose his version of order on an off-kilter landscape and society.

"It kind of reminded me of a Western," Oldman says. "I'd never done anything like that. There was no real description of [Carnegie].

"You have all these guys looking post-apocalyptic. I'm the guy with the water and the soap and I run the place. I should be clean-shaven. That was the look that we went with."

Carnegie's attempts to win over, corrupt and finally eliminate Washington's Eli are the core of the movie, which was filmed in the desert wastelands of New Mexico.

"I was happy to just fly with him, go with him," Oldman says of Washington. "You have to admire the commitment to the work because we're not - I'm not - 20, but he's got so much energy.

"To get older and see his commitment to the training and the choreography - it's admirable to watch someone do it at that age for the part, because he's not a kid any more."

As Oldman and Hughes both point out, there could be absolutely no faking it for Washington.

His fight scenes were complex, tightly choreographed and filmed in single takes as multiple wide shots.

"He had to learn these things," Oldman says, "like a dance."

* The Book of Eli is screening now.

- © Fairfax NZ News