Kind of a strange choice for a Thanksgiving release. I guess it was supposed to come out last year, but Hillcoat says the original release date was never achievable.
I don’t think anything could be as bleak as the novel, but the movie follows it pretty faithfully. Viggio and Kodi are perfect as the man and the boy, but Charlize Theron can’t match Mortenson’s intensity in their scenes together. (Kodi’s resemblance to Charlize is uncanny). Robert Duvall was amazing as the old man; too bad his part is so short-I think it’s worthy of a supporting-actor Oscar nod.
The cinematography is top notch, the blasted landscapes and their frozen campsites in the dying forests and under the bridges are right out of the book. And the lack of color–everything is so muted that at one point the bright colors of a blanket seem to jump out at you.
The movie doesn’t shy away from the gruesome aspects of the book, but it doesn’t dwell on them either. A lot of people said they were glad they read the book but they wouldn’t ever read it again. Will they go to the movie? I think it’s worth seeing, but I hate to think what kind of impression it will make on people who don’t know the story ahead of time.
It’s not playing in Chattanooga, which really annoys and frustrates me.
How an adaptation of a Pulitzer prize winning novel by the author whose most recent adaptation won the friggin’ Oscar for Best Picture, that also happens to star Viggo Mortensen isn’t playing in a mid-city market just astounds me.
Well that sucks. See, this is one of the things that keeps me from moving to Chattanooga.
Saw it last night at the Tara in Atlanta. It is very faithful to the book which is to say that the movie is, by turns, bleak and harrowing. And I agree that the cinematography is amazing.
I also enjoyed Robert Duvall’s performance. He and Guy Pearce were almost unrecognizable with their apocalyptic makeup and really apocalyptic teeth.
Count me among those who read the book and can’t imagine subjecting themselves to a movie that is, by all accounts, a very faithful adaptation. I do love Robert Duvall, though.
Anyone know anything about the releases on this one.
Right now it is only showing at a the Kendal in Cambridge near me. This is very unusual for even the most indi of films. I have a few theaters much closer that typically carry indi films. I’ve been spoiled for a few years not not having to go far to catch films. When I heard about this one I figured it would be a wide release. Guess I was wrong on that.
Is it reasonable to expect more theaters to pick it up in the next few weeks or should I just head into Boston to catch the show?
So Robert Duvall was the old man? My friend and I were trying to figure out who he was.
Yikes.
For those who are on the fence about seeing it – you probably shouldn’t. It really is quite possibly the most depressing movie I’ve ever seen in a half century of moviegoing.
That makes me want to see it all the more. I’m really, really aggravated that the closest showing is in friggin’ Atlanta, over a hundred miles away. Gah.
No, haven’t read the book. The friend I went with had, which is why he wanted to see the movie (I didn’t, particularly, but it was his turn to pick). He thought the book was better, because of the beauty of the language. (He also said that they softened things quite a bit in places in the movie. Omigod.)
Go see it then. I liked it, but it shouldn’t have had a happy ending. As a matter of fact, I thought that the movie should have been even bleaker throughout. While it may be the closest depiction to what the end of the world might actually be like, some of the things that happened to help the pair NEVER would have happened in real life.
Don’t read if you haven’t seen the movie or read the book…
Come on, on the brink of starvation they conveniently find a fallout shelter full of food? An entire family, and their dog, survives? Really? Do those things happen in the book?
Re: the question in your spoilerbox, per my friend:
[spoiler]Family, yes, dog, no.
Didn’t ask about the bomb shleter though.[/spoiler]
And “happy ending” is completely relative, given how bleak this thing is. Happy enough that you don’t immediately kill yourself upon leaving the theater, sure. “Happy” in any kind of meaningful sense – no, not really.
Yes. The bomb shelter is in the book. They hide out there for days. The family’s also in it, as is a dog. They hear it barking near the deserted city near the underpass with the overturned truck they hide out under.
Spoilers about the book:
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the ending of the book involves them in an infuriating Christian allegory. The book’s one of my most favorite ever, but I **HATED **the ending of the book. It should have ended with the Boy all alone instead of being rescued by a family three days after the Man dies. That they just so happened to have a daughter of his approximate age just made it all the worse.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how the movie ends too. Regarding one of the spoilers…
[spoiler]I at least hoped the family investigated the shelter after the Man and Boy left, and got a lot of food of their own to take with them. It’s not shown if they did. Did they in the book?
I was hoping that when they ran out of the House of Horrors, Man could have grabbed one of the rifles to take.[/spoiler]
I liked the movie, I only have tiny nitpicks about reality vs. moviedom. But now I see that most of the same stuff I went huh? over was in the book too.
Twickster, I know what you mean, but it could have ended with…
[spoiler]the Boy just walking off, heading south by himself. That’s what most likely would have happened in reality. But now he has a family! And there’s Hope For Mankind! That just didn’t seem very realistic. Everything else (except the bomb shelter) seemed realistic.
If it were me I would have headed back to the bomb shelter. And by the way, if it’s mentioned in the book, why did the family at the farmhouse die in their beds, and didn’t use that bomb shelter?[/spoiler]
[spoiler]The shelter’s never mentioned again after they leave it, and they didn’t take much, if anything with them when they left. They left it in the book because the Man knew it wouldn’t last them forever and that it wasn’t smart to stay in one place for too long.
I don’t remember anything about people dying in their beds. It’s been about a year since I read the book, though.[/spoiler]
These spoiler boxes are nuts – I’m claiming mod privilege and declaring this an open-spoiler thread. (Note: have changed thread title to reflect.)
Re: the bomb shelter – I’m pretty sure that the house where the father looked in the bed, found the skeleton peacefully decaying, and took the blanket to give to his son.
Question: When they were at the father’s boyhood home and the son thought he saw a kid – did he? and was that the kid from the end?
I remember that the kid thought he heard a dog when they were in the bomb shelter.
If a dog did survive, though – why would you keep the dog alive? Wouldn’t the amount of meat you’d need to feed it far outweigh any use it could be to you for protection?
And, as I said, I didn’t read the book – my saying “no dog at the end with the family” is based on what my friend said.
Leaving the bomb shelter seemed like a major tactical error to me. Seems to me that they should have stayed there until the food was gone or nearly so, and in the interim a lot of the people who were causing them trouble topside would have simply starved to death.
There was one point in the book where the Boy thought he saw someone in a window, I think, and I took that as foreshadowing of his saviors at the end, otherwise they would have been even more *deus ex-y *than they already were.
Really, as much as I rail on the ending, I thought the rest of the book was simply magnificent.