trailer break: ‘The Book of Eli’

I heard a word on The Colbert Show last week that I’d never heard before, but the instant I heard it, I knew I loved it. That word is afterscape.

I love learning new words, because now I can say this: The afterscape in the Hughes Brothers’ new postapocalyptic thriller The Book of Eli looks awfully familiar. Can’t someone invent a new end of the world? Why does it all have to end in ways that we already know? Surely we could get, I dunno, a green apocalypse, wherein some Gaia-loving mad scientist unleashes a mutant virus that turns everything into plants... except for the last stragglers of humanity who have so far managed to avoid getting triffidized.

I mean, really: Must the apocalypse be so gray and dusty?

Also: You’d think that whatever stupid thing we did that caused the apocalypse -- like punching a hole in the sky -- might cause the survivors to reevaluate their priorities and make a conscious effort to move away from violence and hatred and knee-jerkery.

I guess that wouldn’t make much of a kick-ass movie, though.

Also also: Was gonna resist it, but I can’t. Is Denzel Washington suffering through his own personal career apocalypse? A January end-of-the-world movie, Den? Really?

The Book of Eli opens in the U.S. and the U.K. on January 15, 2010.