Movie Review: The Road

So I’m not doing the old version any more. It was too hard coming up with haikus for every movie I saw. Not that I see a lot of movies, but still — writing haiku for The Dark Knight et al gets irritating.

The Road, then:

• I liked the book a lot better. I don’t think the movie did anything wrong per se, but it didn’t really do anything right, either. Just came off as dim and lifeless.
• Liked when Viggo Mortensen lost control of his accent, especially on the word “food”, where he sounded like an owl. Hi-larious. To me.
• The movie plays like a revue of post-apocalyptic fiction cliches — cannibalism, scrounging for ammo, pushing grocery carts, bloody-thirsty gangs, people kept in pens for food, etc.
• You’d think that a kid who was born at the onset of the apocalypse would be used to it by the time he was 11 (or whatever). This kid was freaked out by everything. Defied credibility.
• Plus his dad babied him too much.
• And there was no credible sense in which the kid’s degree of worrying about everything was equal to his dad’s.
• Why can’t a movie show characters eating without showing them eating with their mouths open?
• If it’s after the apocalypse and roving gangs driving around in trucks are a major threat, wouldn’t you probably STAY OFF THE ROAD?
• It doesn’t seem like ammo should be harder to find than food.
• And what kind of apocalypse is it where humans survive but cockroaches don’t?
• And given that there’s still plenty of water on the planet, how is it that nothing can grow?
• Also liked seeing Guy Pearce dressed up like Eddie Vedder at the end.

Etc. A lot of those problems derive from the source material — but they’re a lot easier to ignore in book-form in that the book doesn’t really call that much attention to them. When they’re shown in moving pictures, though, it’s hard to not notice.

I like post-apocalyptic and bleak in itself isn’t a turnoff, but yeah: no.

Final score: 5/10.

bkd