I really have to keep my expectations in check because this movie's release delays only serve to get me even antsier to see it, but the first official review of The Road, courtesy of Esquire magazine, is certainly not helping. The publication is bold enough to call it the "Most Important Movie of the Year."
Adapted from the 2006 Cormac McCarthy novel, the film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father-and-son duo traipsing through an apocalyptic American landscape. Another movie released this year that took major cues from the novel is Terminator Salvation, but I don't think there's much chance of it being lauded as being the most important movie of the year.
What makes this project so exciting, I think, is not so much the subject matter as it is the people involved. Viggo, in a movie by John Hillcoat (The Proposition), adapted from Cormac McCarthy, with a score by Nick Cave? Hearing praises for it does not surprise me.
The review, which is part of a feature on the film and its filmmakers, also has Hillcoat describing the landscape of the film, which sounds pretty incredible:
"Initially we were talking about [filming in] Australia or Iceland," Hillcoat says. "But all of our research took us to looking at images of events like Mount St. Helens, the volcanoes in the Philippines, Hiroshima, Katrina, a set of man-made and natural disasters that have been heavily photographed and filmed. My production designer, sitting in the countryside in Victoria, Australia, found eight miles of abandoned freeway in Pennsylvania on Google Earth, which gave us those dark tunnels. We deliberately used America's real apocalyptic zones. We went to New Orleans to shoot our interior shots in a ruined shopping mall in post-Katrina New Orleans. We used the strip mines in western Pennsylvania. Even billowing clouds in the background of one scene come from 9/11.
"When they pass through a city, there's a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There's a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape."
Originally scheduled for November 2008, it was continuously shelved for a year (the new release date is October 16—if we're lucky), partly due to what was considered to be an overcrowded Oscar season. It's also rumored that The Road's faithful depiction of the novel's bleak and depressing tale is something that contributed to its seemingly reluctant release.
Esquire's piece also describes an interesting bit on info: the Weinstein Company has trailers cut for the film, and apparently they're trying to make it look like an action movie. What's more, the beginning of the trailer apparently makes use of news footage assembled to hint at a catastrophic event—something that doesn't happen in neither the book nor the movie. But that's movie marketing for ya.
