*Spoilers*
Yesterday, in early celebration of my birthday, my friends and I gathered in the 6th floor lounge to watch a movie. We’d decided on The Shining but it was no longer on Netflix. In search for a new horror movie to watch, we stumbled across Eli, and let me tell you, it was not at all what I thought it would be.
Eli, a Netflix original, was released on October 18, 2019 and directed by Ciaran Foy – produced by Trevor Macy and John Zaozirny. Essentially, the movie is about a boy named Eli, given the title, and he was told that he was allergic to the outside. Whenever he touched something from outside of his hazmat suit or breathed in ‘unclean air’, he would break out into what he thought was hives which would burn his entire body. His father found a doctor that said she could help them cure the child. The mother, clueless to what this doctor would actually do, went along with the plan to get him help. Throughout the night, Eli would be ‘attacked’ by ghosts that were actually attempting to help him out of his predicament. Come to find out, the woman and her assistants were nuns attempting to reverse his genes. Eli was the son of the devil.
Now that we’ve established a brief-as-possible summary of the story, let’s look at everything that was a bit off with the movie and its plot line. I will say that it was not a terrible movie. It wasn’t even a bad movie. However, there were things in the movie that really could’ve been improved upon to turn the movie into something so fantastic and interesting.
Repetition was something that I noticed was very prevalent within the movie. The scenes began to repeat themselves as far as the situations go. Eli would be attacked by the ghosts that haunted the care home and they would reveal a piece of evidence about the ‘doctor’ and what she was doing to him during the procedures. He would then get caught and tell his parents what was happening. Each time they wouldn’t listen, and each time he would throw an angry fit. It’d gotten to the point where you could basically predict what was going to happen in a scene. It was a bit flat.
His mother and father weren’t so much static as they could’ve just been varied a little more in emotion. Their reactions to situations were basically the same reaction as situations before that, for the most part. It made the audience develop an early on stereotype about the pair and it lessened the drama that the writers and the team was going for.
It seemed that their need for dramatization was dire because they attempted to use a character on the outside of the building to draw it out of the story. However, they abused the addition of such a character. The most that she did was basically get Eli to talk more about what was happening to him. It seemed like a waste of opportunity and a waste of a potentially good character.
To top it all off, the ending seemed a bit thrown together. It was very interesting, sure, but it wasn’t enough. This is when Eli is randomly thrown into a ritual dungeon where the bodies that belonged to the ghosts that were helping him get out were buried. We find out a little too quickly and randomly that those ghosts were his half-siblings, including the underused character I mentioned before. Now, in itself, it’s a very interesting concept but it was brought up too quickly. You see, the ending is him becoming his ‘ultimate form’, inverting his father’s face for trying to stab him, and turning nuns into upside down crosses and burning them. I must say, with that much action, introducing all this new information about this character’s relationships in the very end of the movie is a bit too much. The underrated character is waiting outside while Eli and his mother walk out of the burning building. The character explains that not only she was his half-sister, but so was the others. She then proceeds to take them to hell to see Lucifer. Very anti-climatic, yeah?
The movie was pretty adequate for entertainment purposes, I assume, but there was so much potential. The creators gave themselves opportunities to make the movie so powerful and shocking but didn’t take it with as much force as they should’ve. On a scale of five stars, it’s gonna have to be a three for me.
