The film starts with a shot of an abandoned factory. It’s rundown and dilapidated. Some gunshots are shown and then an explosion goes off, blasting a hole through the walls of the building.
In the next scene, Hal Solinski is called from the school because his adopted son Elijah/Eli has gotten in trouble for fighting. He has done this for the third time now. Eli also gets suspended from the school for the fight. After that Eli returns to his home and is unable to find his father. He then rushes to an abandoned building for the purpose of finding some aluminum and copper wires. Actually, Eli wants to buy new shoes by selling the wires as his old ones are really rough. He then contacts a wire seller to buy his wires, and the seller replies that the wires he has brought are not sufficient for the amount of money buying new shoes. It will require more wires. On hearing this, Eli moves to the broken building which was portrayed at the beginning of the movie. When he reaches there and starts to move around, he feels the presence of others in the building. After looking around for some time, Eli finds dead bodies on the floor wearing a high-tech protective suit and a modern and fully automatic gun beside the bodies. He picks up the gun and it automatically activates. Meanwhile, one of the dead bodies tries to catch Eli’s hand. Eli becomes scared and rushes towards his home.