I really, really liked this book and was looking forward to the movie but it looks like Hollywood got a hold of it and (at least in the trailer) changed up some of the stuff I loved about the book.
The book was purposefully vague about what caused the end of civilization and for good reason. It wasn’t important to the story. But because people like footage of doomsday armageddon it appears they just had to stick some in there.
And either the mom/wife role (Charlize Theron) is greatly expanded or the trailer is very misleading. I think they mentioned her once or twice in the book and was through past memories of her.
The trailer also seems to want to make this an action/adventure/thriller which it was far from. And once you set it up as that the action/adventure crowd always wants some type of happy ending.
The book was a bleak, vague story of survival set during the twilight of mankind. A father and son living day to day just because. Nothing to live for except maybe living another day. And no details about the past or the future are given.
I can’t view video at work. How explicit do they make the doomsday event? I seem to remember it only being a bright flash in the book, and the Man responded immediately by filling the tub with water. Clues that it was probably nuclear, but still pretty vague.
I’ll have to view it to see it in context, but that doesn’t sound that bad, actually. It sounds like general chaos, and the severe weather being representative of Earth taking back what was taken from it.
But that’s not what the book’s about. The level of devestation is so complete - no animals other than humans, no plants at all - that it can’t really be seen as a standard-issue “Earth rejecting mankind” scenario.
I’m not trying to imply that. As I said, I really need to view the trailer, and I should stop commenting until I do, but I can easily see those as nothing more than establishing shots to show what’s happened in the wake of the event. It’s completely irrelevant to the story of survival told in the book, but it’s a quick and easy way to set the setting and wasn’t what I was expecting from reading the OP.
Someone at Esquire wrote a review that was published last week, in which he explicitly states that the disaster shots at the beginning of the trailer aren’t in the film at all, and that the trailer repackaged the film as a standard action/adventure/disaster film, when in actuality the film itself is very true to the book. I wouldn’t worry too much.
It does look like they’ve made the book into a standard disaster/apocalypse movie. I love those movies (and books), and my favorite part is the build-up – the newscasts, people scrambling to safety, hapless government officials, etc. I was a bit disappointed that the book didn’t give me this, but the story was more powerful because the emphasis was on survival, and the father’s love for his boy. I think the movie can still show this.
Plus, showing the event will keep the guy sitting behind us in the theater from asking “What happened? Why’s everything so dead? Where’s the mom?”
Oh god, that trailer is so gawd awful. You can tell they tried way too hard to make it look like a Roland Emmerich action flick. It’s so dumb they feel they need to do that.
Present the movie truthfully, for godsakes.
The shots they did show, do seem true to the book (besides the expanded Wife part… but sometimes you have to expand things to make it work in a movie), and it’s exciting to see… but the tone of that trailer was all wrong. For shame. Glad those “natural disaster” shots won’t be in the film. Leave the explanation of the disaster alone, it’s not what the story is about.
Yup, particularly since the production crew is stellar; a lot of the same team that made The Proposition (an awesome gritty n’ nasty australian western). Plus soundtrack by Nick Cave; how could you go wrong?
Okay. I finally watched it and see what the concerns were about. I’m hoping **Gam Zeh Yaavor **is correct, and that’s all for the trailer, because I’ll be pretty annoyed otherwise.
I am hoping the trailer makes people that haven’t read the book mad… because that means it is the powerful journey that I read and not… well, what the trailer was.
Though it wouldn’t be the first time a trailer mislead people as to what a movie was actually going to be.
Really enjoyed the book, and while I have not seen the trailer, this seems like the kind of story that Hollywood will feel compelled to “improve upon” thereby making the final movie markedly different from the original source material…
For example, in the novel the wife/mother character is only mentioned on a page or two, and I would be willing to bet that Charlize Theron is on camera for more than just a brief moment or so.
It just dosent seem like the kind of adaptation that will translate from page to screen successfully.
Castaway, and yes, if I’m remembering the movie correctly (it’s been years), that’s the kind of pacing this movie needs. It can work, and the book was fantastic, so I’m really hoping they get this right.
Well, there were evil hilbillies in the novel, so it’s only fair.
