• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Jun 11, 2014 By Austin Trunick Web Exclusive

It’s amazing how more than 60 years after The Day The Earth Stood Still that we’re still finding creative ways to portray mankind’s final days. Bong Joon-Ho’s imminent Snowpiercer depicts a frozen CGI landscape that stretches endlessly beyond the walls of a barreling locomotive. The Maze Runner takes place in a nigh-inescapable labyrinth. Last year’s The World’s End saw body-snatching aliens infiltrate and English pub crawl, while This Is The End trapped bro-com all-stars in James Franco’s house. In speculative cinema, it seems there’s no more popular a subject than the end of the world as we know it. (See our reviews of X-Men: Days of Future Past and Goodbye World for two more examples from the last three months alone.)

In David Michod’s The Rover, the end of the world looks like a few bad neighborhoods in Australia. The film’s outback setting has seen it draw comparisons to George Miller and Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, and the story’s impetus—a stolen car—certainly helps align The Rover with its post-apocalyptic predecessor from down under. The action shifts between the broad, empty desert and deteriorating homesteads; through his settings alone, Michod has no problem selling his audience a society driven by guns and gasoline, “ten years after a collapse of the Western economic system.” The denizens with which he populates the world, however—grumbling dwarfs, and mystic-speaking madams—dangerously alter the film’s tone, away from the serious feature it feels like it wants to be and into the realm of the b-movies it occasionally seems to pastiche.

Guy Pearce stars as Eric, the despondent drifter whose car is lifted by a gang of criminals in the film’s first few minutes. This begins a dogged pursuit across the Australian landscape in which he befriends Rey (Robert Pattinson), the developmentally disabled brother of one of the car-thieves, who’d been left for dead after a shoot-out.

The Rover’s primary fault lies in its uncharismatic anti-hero: Pearce’s Eric is a remorseless killer bent on getting back his vehicle, no matter what measure need be taken with those who stand in his way. His back story eventually reveals what made him that way—and explains his fixation with this one, particular mid-sized sedan—but it’s too little too late. Eric has so little regard for his own safety that it makes it hard for us to care whether he lives or dies; nothing about him conveys more than the generic “bad-ass loner” stereotype until the film’s final scenes. There are plenty of ways to make a simple, straight-forward man-on-a-mission story work—the recent Blue Ruin is a fantastic example—but it helps incredibly to know why we should care about the man or his mission in the first place.

a24films.com/films/the-rover-3/

Author rating: 5/10