The Road

[Deleted member 56031]

That trailer looked quite good at first but the last half was SOOOO bad! :O

Rubbish music and cheesy dialogue that seemed to be about instilling hope which was totally out of place with the start of the trailer plus that scream at 2:10 was incredibly out of place that I burst out laughing when I heard it

 

[dfc05]

I saw it today. Advance warning: I suck at reviewing things since I'm really un-opinionated and indecisive. Also, having read the book a few times, I anticipated half the dialogue before it was said, so that felt really strange and threw me off a little. I keep overanalyzing whether I liked or disliked things because of the movie itself, or in relation to the book.

I think I'd rate it somewhere around 8 to 9 out of 10. It was pretty faithful to the book although the order of some scenes were moved around. The boy did seem a lot older than in the book (he wasn't much shorter than Charlize Theron!) but there wasn't much option so I don't fault them on it.

Visually, it was very good (and by "good" I mean bleak ). There was only one part I noticed where the trees still had a lot of brown leaves conspicuously hanging on them, but other than that, the world looked dead enough. One of my favorite scenes was when

Spoiler

the trees start falling down around them. That's definitely a good one to see in a movie theater, or with a really good sound system.

It seems a good number of critics had issues with the soundtrack being intrusive. I noticed the music when it was playing but didn't mind it that much. I also thought the voice-overs were done fairly well. Viggo mostly spoke over scenes where he and the boy are just walking.

Overall, I really loved the very first 10-15 minutes of it. They seemed to load most of the more devastating vistas toward the beginning. I wasn't as much a fan of the rest of the first half -- it seemed a little choppy. For example, some scenes like

Spoiler

when they get to the waterfall and swim around for a little bit

were allotted 15 seconds of time, so they weren't able to add anything significant. I thought the last half was very good though. I was even fine with the ending. I kinda had hopes that the last paragraph of the book would somehow be read or conveyed in the movie. It wasn't there, but it wouldn't have fit anyways. The entire movie did a good job on an emotional level as well.

 

[knut]

Good to hear. I hope it's getting quite a wide release over it. I don't expect to see it in Falmouth any time soon but I'm hoping I can catch it on release night in Wolverhampton on the 8th of Jan so that I can see it on a big screen before I come back to Fal for uni. Excited!

 

[dfc05]

It was a limited release here but hopefully they'll get it out to more theaters. I had originally planned on waiting until Christmas to see it with my sister in Houston, but it was only playing at one theater (which typically shows only the special/limited releases), so I wasn't sure if they'd still have it by then. It's only at ~100 theaters. Given the lack of marketing/publicity for the movie, I doubt there are many people who didn't read the book who even know about it. I went to the morning showing so there weren't a lot of people there, but about half were college kids (who probably read the book), and half were middle aged women (who probably read the book, via Oprah's Book Club ).