The Road: New Clips & An Early Review

THe Road: Father and Son Walking

A whole bunch of new clips from the big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s (No Country For Old Men) Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road have appeared online, and I thought you fans of McCarthy’s work might like to have a look at a few them so you can get a sense of how the film stacks up to the book.

We’ve also dug up an early review of The Road from Variety’s Todd McCarthy. Wanna know the early verdict on The Road? Then you better keep reading.

First, the clips. I’m only going to post three of them, but there are more if you want to check them out. For now, have a look at these:

[WARNING THEY DO CONTAIN SPOILERS]:

For the full gallery of clips you can go here.

The “action” scenes are ok enough (the impact isn’t nearly as horrifying or visceral as McCarthy wrote them to be), but it’s the scene around the fire where The Man (Viggio Mortensen) and The Boy Kodi Smit-McPhee) converse with The Old Man (Robert Duvall) that really drew me in. That scene is the only one in the bunch that absolutely felt like it captured the mood and sentiment of McCarthy’s novel. The other clips… they looked ok enough, as I said, but for this film I think people are expecting “great” and “ok” probably won’t cut it.

Todd McCarthy over at Variety seems to agree. In his review, T. McCarthy claims that John Hillcoat’s film manages to capture a lot of the look of C. McCarthy’s story, but not much of the soul and/or sentiment. An even worse sign: T. McCarthy claims that Mortensen and Smit-McPhee lack the necessary chemistry to bring the central story of The Road (the bond between father and son) to life onscreen. GROAN….

One last thing from the review that really pissed me off: T. McCarthy claims that The Road shows every indication of having been tampered with to death, an issue that we first raised exclusively here at Screen Rant, after an inside source whispered in our ear that The Weinstein Company has been tampering with the film, going so far as to alter the trailer, adding stock disaster footage and rearranging scenes in order to promote The Road as a post-apocalyptic action/disaster flick, which it most certainly is not. A lot of readers responded to that post by saying “Duh, they want people to go see it,” however, if Variety’s review is even close to the mark, then what could have been a great film may end up as yet another casualty of Hollywood idiocy hustling.

The Road Man and Boy embrace

Glad the Weinsteins held the movie back a full year for this…

For Todd McCarthy’s full review you can go here.

What did YOU think about the clips from The Road? How about the early review of the film – does it sound spot-on to you?

The Road will be in theaters on October 16, 2009. It also stars Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Michael K. Williams, Garrett Dillahunt and Molly Parker.

Sources: The Movie Room & Variety