{"id":6337,"date":"2009-12-07T07:09:57","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T12:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=6337"},"modified":"2016-01-10T13:42:31","modified_gmt":"2016-01-10T18:42:31","slug":"review-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/07\/review-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: THE ROAD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheRoadPoster\"<\/a>I was looking forward to seeing The Road<\/strong>.\u00a0 I have not read the book by Cormac McCarthy, but then, I have never read The Wizard Of Oz<\/strong>, Gone With The Wind<\/strong> or Twilight<\/strong> and that has not stopped me from enjoying those films.<\/p>\n

What really interested me in seeing The Road<\/strong> was the fact it was an \u201cEnd Of The World\u201d movie.\u00a0 While that may not be a genre by itself, I have always loved movies that threaten, depict, portend, demonstrate or are either pre or post apocalyptic.\u00a0 One of the most joyous experiences I ever had at the movies was at the end of Michael Tolkin\u2019s 1991 film The Rapture<\/strong> when the biblical prophecies alluded to throughout the film actually came true in very imaginative ways to my great delight and this is praise coming from an atheist who finds the Bible patently ridiculous.<\/p>\n

The Road<\/strong> started off well.\u00a0 The film had an interesting if not very unique look and I certainly liked the bleak music score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, but it wasn\u2019t long before The Road<\/strong> began to quickly go down hill.\u00a0 The main reason for my disappointment was the fact the film never addresses what kind of disaster it was that destroyed the Earth. I understand why that information was not necessary in the book.\u00a0 From what I gather, the book was less a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic world and more an allegory about humanity surviving, hopefully with its morals and ethics intact.\u00a0 In many ways, the type of disaster that has befallen the Earth is unimportant, its just the \u201cMaguffin\u201d, the thing that gets the story moving and involves all the characters.<\/p>\n

But film is a very literal medium and The Road<\/strong> would have benefited by having had someone think a little bit more about what kind of disaster it was that has befallen the Earth. I\u2019ve been criticized for focusing on this one point and I am being told by people that the actual type of disaster doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t matter?\u00a0 Perhaps that\u2019s true for the book, but the entire look of the film from its physical staging, to the costumes, the make-up and production design all grow organically from whatever kind of disaster it was.\u00a0 Believe me, the remnants of a nuclear holocaust would look very different from say, an environmental disaster or a disease epidemic.<\/p>\n

Would it have been so difficult for the filmmakers to have selected one kind of disaster and then have focused their energies into making that reality consistent? What am I to think about the numerous conflicting visuals presented in The Road<\/strong>?\u00a0 We see huge ships, their keels broken, laying on inland highways quite far from the ocean.\u00a0 How did they get there?\u00a0 Was their massive worldwide flooding?\u00a0 There is no other visual evidence indicating massive flooding.<\/p>\n

And yes, we do know what that kind of disaster looks like.\u00a0 Check out photos of New Orleans post-Katrina or the coastal towns of Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004.\u00a0 Talk about a worldwide disaster, the massive undersea quake on December 26, 2004 caused the entire Earth to wobble about 1\u201d and shortened the length of the day by almost 3 micro-seconds.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s a worldwide event!<\/p>\n

\"ROAD<\/a>Much of The Road<\/strong> is spent wandering around in formerly tree rich areas (the film was partly shot in my home state of Pennsylvania, which believe me, North, South, East and West, we have lots of trees here), but the trees shown in this film are all dead, dried out, rotted and prone to collapse, leading to several tense scenes as Papa Viggo and Kiddie Kodi have to dodge falling timber. These massive piles of\u00a0 kindling are also prone to bursting into flames, in fact, many times in the film we see the characters walking through what initially appears to be snow, but actually turns out to be falling ash from those burning trees.<\/p>\n

And yet, there is an almost constant cover of dark grey clouds and copious rainfall everywhere they travel.\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 How can the trees and the ground be so dry as to spontaneously combust, yet barely a day goes by without a drenching rainfall?\u00a0 I accept the fact I may be the only person who cares about this inconsistency, but I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m the only one who\u2019s noticed it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s because I do love \u201cEnd Of The World\u201d movies that I don\u2019t allow filmmakers to simply retreat into vague notions of unnamed calamity as catch-all explanation for their attempts at heightened drama and forced action.\u00a0 This is a cop-out in the same way bad sci-fi films use the vagueness of \u201ctime travel\u201d to cover over their creators lack of even trying to make their stories plausible. Come on filmmakers, you\u2019re the ones spending millions of dollars here, you\u2019re the ones asking me to spend two hours of my life here, it is your job to make the best film you can and if you slack off on the hard stuff, like making a film that makes sense, even within the limited frame of reference and reality you are creating, then I have every right to call you out on it.<\/p>\n

I have had some friends of mine tell me that I should simply view The Road<\/strong> as a tense story of survival between a father and his young son.\u00a0 This is the wrong way to approach me.\u00a0 I am not a person who is automatically concerned simply because a character in jeopardy happens to be a child.\u00a0 My general attitude is \u201cF**K\u201d the children.\u00a0 Far from being the key to our future, I have seen too many contemporary adult lives ruined by kids.<\/p>\n

Am I being unnecessarily hard on the filmmakers?\u00a0 Perhaps, but filmmaking is a hard job and if you are not up to the task, well, they always have room on the night shift at McDonalds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was looking forward to seeing The Road.\u00a0 I have not read the book by Cormac McCarthy, but then, I have never read The Wizard Of Oz, Gone With The Wind or Twilight and that [click for more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":6339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[401,2264,2265],"series":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-review","8":"tag-cormac-mccarthy","9":"tag-the-road","10":"tag-viggo-mortensen"},"aioseo_notices":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":false,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6337"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=6337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}