Spoiler Alert! Right off the bat, I'm telling you, dear reader, that this is intended for those who have already seen the film at least once. If you don't want the big reveal, the M. Night Shyamalan trick, presented to you and thrown in your face, then don't read this review! I'm telling you, and this is the last time: I'm going to talk about it!

The Book of Eli is easily the most brilliant movie that I've seen this year. I'm biased; I hate when I have a movie that is supposed to be more than popcorn & candy fodder figured out in the first third. With Denzel Washington's latest, I was lured into the world of a man on the run, a man on a mission, a man who believed he was driven by God. But the hook, the fact that Eli sees nothing we see and other things we don't, wow, that blew me away. I was ready to run back in and see it again (which was cost preventitive) and I told everyone I knew that they should see it. And then Warner Brothers sent it to me in startling Blu-ray and I was blown away again.

Your second time through, you know what you're getting. You witness Eli's inability to see the man hanging in the closet, but the recognition of his smell, and the feeling out of where the hanging man's feet are until he can get his boots. You recognize that he "sees" the murder and rape too late to stop it but recognizes the sounds of those men later in the Carnegie town bar and brings them to justice. You see why he uses the tunnel in the first confrontation to make his way into battle with the marauders, how he uses echo location to make his mark.

But you didn't see that the first time through.

The first viewing of the Book of Eli shows you how much you miss, what you aren't looking for, how you yourself have become blind. The fact that Eli can "see" and the other characters can't, even though they can use their eyesight and he cannot, becomes a clearcut lesson in the ways that we have allowed things around us (persons, places, situations) to dull our senses and blind us to what is really out there. Jesus restored sight to the blind, forgiving sins and encouraging people to live differently, but the levels of blindness were spiritual to physical. And that's the realm of the Hughes brothers' look as well.

Carnegie (Gary Oldman) wants the Bible for power purposes; the animated featurette lends to your understanding of what the directors were thinking of when they created Billy Carnegie. Power corrupts but so does hate. Using the Bible for power and control? Well, that's naturally going to blow up in your face before too long, but that's all Carnegie knew of the book. He is blind to its love. But Eli is blind to its love, too. He needs Solara (Mila Kunis) to come along and change his perspective, because he's been living in isolation and loneliness for so long. He needs the healing power of community to reframe how he reads the Scripture and what it means for him.

Of course, we're bound to hate Carnegie, and dislike certain characters more than others, but each of them is blind. They need each other to figure it out. Their Bible, their reading, isn't meant for isolation, because it becomes similar to speaking in tongues and interpreting yourself (a no-no)—you need community to see the big picture! Eli learns that in the end, and the ending of the movie leads us to believe Carnegie may, too, given that he can't read Eli's copy. But that's the other "flipside" here: the Bible and its truth restores sight to the blind, but it also breaks the chains of oppression, throws the status quo on its head, and declares that all human beings are free and created by an all-loving Creator. That's true vision indeed.