Guy's panties in a bunch...Everybody that saw the trailer to this film probably thought that this was gonna be an epic post-apocalyptic movie. Well, it wasn't. In the trailer we are led to believe that Viggo will loose his son to some kidnapping cannibals. This is far from the truth for his son is with him throughout the whole movie.
The movie is more about Viggo keeping a promise to his wife that left him after the apocalypse. He promised to keep the son safe. His version of safe seems to be him putting a gun to the son's head every time something scary is going down. By scary I mean weird noises and other crazy wanderers that wander the decaying wilderness. Somehow I might have preferred to be eaten by cannibals than hang out with my crazy dad.
All in all this movie is bleak, grey and not that eventful. The same thing seems to happen over and over again. They find food, eat it, run away from cannibals, cough up blood and prepare for certain death. Not a lot of humor here.
Guy's Rating: Watch if you feel like being depressed for a couple of hours. Not that the subject matter will get you down. You'll get down because you'll never have those 90 min back.
Girl's bleak reflection...
This movie could have been so much more, but it wasn't.
Viggo was amazing as a conflicted, tormented, dying father. The visuals were captivating, with the desolate landscape and desolate costumes. That's about it, though.
The kid actor sucked. No kid that grew up during the apocalypse would be that naive and good-natured. He was an idiot, and I didn't like him.
Charlize Theron is such a good actress, but she was wasted in the poorly edited flashbacks that gave me nothing in terms of rounding out the story or the characters. We already got that Viggo was tormented, right from the moment he made his kid practice putting a gun in his father's mouth. We didn't need to see the past when the present was so much more interesting... or could have been, if they hadn't fucked up and made the present so bleak and boring and full of the stupid kid. What would have made the movie great? Have the cannibals kill and eat the kid, then give Viggo a sword and a sawed-off shotgun, and bring Charlize Theron in as a crazed cannibal.
Did anyone else notice that there were only three women in this film? Charlize, the mother who abandons her family. Then there was the woman in the field running from the cannibal gangs, too stupid to figure out the skulls and blood were a hint for people -not- to be around there. And, finally, the hippie mother who did a number of things wrong: one, followed Viggo and his son without telling them or helping them at any point, waiting until Viggo is dead before befriending the child; two, sent her scary looking husband with a rifle to question a 9 year old sporting a loaded pistol; and three, blatantly lied to the kid about having been "waiting" for him and "worrying" about him for so long... I would have run far and fast if I was that boy, but obviously this movie wasn't meant to make sense.
Girl's Rating: Other than the appalling lack of female characters (stressing the meaning of the word character: the quality of being individual, typically in an interesting or unusual way) and the terrible casting choice concerning the son, I guess it was OK... Only because of Viggo and that tight ass of his, which you get to see in the movie at minute 58.
No comments:
Post a Comment