Usually for movies, I have one of two options:
1. Mock it by re-writing the summary. Usually this means I either haven’t seen, or am familiar enough with it to ruin the actual movie’s premise.
2. I thoroughly enjoyed it and want you to see it as well.
I’m not much of a movie person though, so if you ask me if I’ve seen a certain movie, my answer tends to be “No”. Not sure why this is, I attribute it to the general blandness of movies. They either possess the same qualities they always have solved in roughly the same manner. Rarely is there a movie so uniformly terrible that I have to warn you.
“The Road” is such a movie. Adapted from a book that reeks of pop-culture awfulness, the movie only expands on this weary cliché of survival following the apocalypse. Generally I’m a big fan of the end of the world, and zombies in general, enjoying their campy nature. Nothing in the movie is remotely like that; it is an absolute bore of a movie.
After the end of the world, a father and son trudge through the wrecked hell scape of this world, searching for meaning. Somehow they turn a story about the end of the world and cannibals into a father-son bonding film. The dialogue revolts me, it is so inauthentic. Constantly he refers to his father as “Papa”. Obviously these two are from Italy in the 19th century, because people rarely, if ever, speak this way.
Maybe I’m just nit-picking, but when there’s so little dialogue in the movie, you’d expect the little that’s actually there to be good. Sadly, that’s not the case, and if the dialogue wasn’t bad enough, you get to hear the father’s internal thoughts, which are uninteresting as well. What makes this almost forgivable is the beautiful, gray, bleakness that the landscape achieves. It is so devoid of life, it is excellent. Shame it is just the background to this miserable bonding movie disguised as ruminations on the end of the world.
Honestly, I saw this with friends who read the book. They told me the book is better. I doubt them. Upon saying how much they enjoyed the book, they told me it helped them get over losing their IPOD while they traveled in Italy. If you need to think about the end of the world in order to realize that the loss of an IPOD isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, you have serious problems.
Everything in the movie is so annoying wimpy. Yeah, I know, it’s a bonding film, but there’s so little to enjoy. It is as if he took the two genres I like (end of world and zombie) and bled them dry, leaving a dried out carcass. Maybe some of Cormac McCarthy’s other stuff is better but this story doesn’t convince me of that. Or, more likely, the director completely butchered the shit out of the book, kind of like what the cannibals do in the movie.
Below are some various screenshots from the movie. I’ve added Tao Lin’s trademark phrase ‘Seems Bleak’ in an attempt to lighten what is otherwise a fairly worthless movie. Hopefully the powerful picture coupled with the distant phrase will make you think about the light-hearted goofy nature of a burned-out shell of society, like Detroit.
