Wouldn’t it figure that while I am out screening 500 Days of Summer the trailer for The Road arrives online making me a little bit late to debut it here on RopeofSilicon. Thanks, though, to all of you that wrote in, if I had been around it would have been up sooner.
Of course, as regular readers know, we have been hotly anticipating this film for about two years now and to finally get our first look is quite an event as Dimension Films has finally confirmed we will be seeing this movie on October 16 after several delays.
The Road stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee and follows them as a father and son journey across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. The film is directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and is based on the fantastic Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”).
Tom Chiarella at Esquire already saw the film and wrote up a piece with a headline reading “The Road is the Most Important Movie of the Year,” which is a blatant grab at reads and it obviously worked judging by the 380 DIGGs it received to date. However, after watching the trailer I will say this film looks like it will be okay, but it doesn’t seem to represent what McCarthy’s book was all about. Also, any attempt to show the cause of the disaster hurts the story, but who knows, that may not make it into the final feature.
Since I went against my vow to not watch trailers and watched the trailer for Nine earlier, and it exceeded my expectations, I gave this one a shot, but now wish I hadn’t. Perhaps this was made merely to get people into theaters and the film will be far more bleak than what is shown here (which is what I actually assume). Quite simply, I need to make sure I remove my love of the book and look forward to what Hillcoat has put together.
Check out the trailer directly below or on Yahoo in high definition right here. For more on The Road, including our gallery of stills, click here.
