The Road Trailer Online
Posted by Stephen Fairbanks on May 16, 2009
Viggo Mortensen and 'Boy'.
‘Post-apocalypse’ is becoming a popular sub genre and sure-fire marketing catchphrase. For example: Wall – E: “Animated post-apocalypse family adventure”, or I Am Legend: “Rubbishy CGI mutanty post-apocalypse Will-Smith vehicle.” So here’s the latest; The Road: “Cormac McCarthy who wrote No Country For Old Men post-apocalypse Adventure with Viggo Mortensen in it.” – Catchy, isn’t it?
Actually, The Road looks more than a little interesting, it fact… it looks pretty damn ace. Viggo Mortensen gets muchos respect from myself, not just because he happens to be fucking Aragorn, but because of the films he’s chosen to star in on the back of his Lord of the Rings breakthrough – most notably the excellent and challenging collaborations with David Cronenberg: A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.
Viggo looks at ease with gitty, harsh realities, so the end of the world seems fair game. The Road follows Mortensen (billed as ‘Man’) alongside Charlize Theron (billed as ‘Wife’) and their son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, billed as ‘Boy’) after the world has effectively ended. Likely due to global warming, judging by the trailer. So you really should be cycling.
It appears life won’t be rosy, as the survivors are scratch around looking for food and water, and it appears ‘Boy’ may be soup de jour…
The film hits cinemas (not literally hits) in October. Check out the Trailer below:
Reader Comments
It does look rather cool. And that boy DOES look tasty.
Oh wow. I actually read the book for this. And I thought ‘wow, great atmosphere and everything is so symbolic but this would never work as a film.’ And now they’re making a film? So two hours or more about two people walking, with maybe two or three exciting bits when they meet other people. See in a book you can spend page after page on characters thinking and on description. But in a film, not so much. It’s not a long book without it. There was more of that than action.
OK just watched the trailer. I want to like it but I don’t know, really. I recognise parts from the book but there are a lot more explosions than I can remember. There’s more action in that trailer than I remember there being in the book. Hm.
I think the the producers tend to put as much explosions into trailers as possible… just because it’ll sell better. Like for example, when you see trailers for foreign films in cinemas, and they never let the actors actually SPEAK – they just show the action and then have captions or a voice-over guy explaining the plot. As if they can fool people who wouldn’t normally go see a foriegn film into doing so. Sneaky shits.
I’m quite interested in this film tho… a thinking man’s Mad Max, perhaps?
This is true but my point is there wasn’t much of that stuff in the book. And the trailers tend to sort of you know have stuff from the film in them ;)
A Mad Max without the Mad bit, perhaps. Walking, Thinking Max. I hope they show what happened in flashbacks as opposed to starting with it and then cutting ahead to like a year later or whenever the story takes place. I’ve not read No Country For Old Men but the author was very happy with the film and how close it had been to the book. I don’t know how close The Road film will/can be to the book. Because there is so much interior monologue and description.
There are some great scenes in the book that are very exciting and interesting. I hope they cut out all the pointing at the map and not speaking in sentences to each other. They don’t have to dramatise the many nightmares he has either, they can just show him wake up with a start and whatnot.
Apparently the wife will have a bigger role in the film. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, what do you think? I thought it worked fine with the few flashbacks they had and the references they made.
Hm I don’t know. I will go and see it to see how it compares to the book but I don’t know if I will like it. Then again the book, although really well-written wasn’t my cup of tea. I don’t know if it was the bleakness of it or just the fact that there was so much interior monologue. Or all the description.
Maybe it’s the lack of food talking *shrugs* Or the lack of Pepsi.
Is any of this making sense?
hmm hmm hmm.. I dont know If Im sold by the trailer. It looks like it could be a load of repetitive nonsense. But then again, perhaps its a jewel just not done justice from a very average trailer. Right now, it looks like a film Id probably download.
Aye, the trailer did not draw me in that much either. I hope it’s better than it looks. Then again the trailer for Role Models did not impress me but I ended up loving the film itself.
The problem with The Road is that it’s not an easy book to adapt into a film. Too much going on inside the main character’s head. It’s not very cinematic to have a guy constantly doing a monologue in his head. But you do have those great visuals of the post-apocalyptic America. So I don’t know. Even if the plot and action doesn’t turn out that great at least we’ll have some cool visuals.
I’ve heard of chick[en] Kiev but this is ridiculous.
Get up-pah!