The Last Old Mod***MDP74 v. 3.0

The Road (movie) builds expectations. To be fair, it is a good, driving movie, painting a unresting picture of the future, raising interesting and valuable questions (despite they are not new and breakthrough), building and keeping the tension with minimum of instruments with great cast and visuality. Intimate yet epic, strong, beautiful and sad. Like life itself. You hardly can be disappointed.

But is it a future classic, the icon of the genre? To be fair, it is not a truly breathtaking cinema – leaving out the basement meat storage scene (you are not breathing because you are dead paralyzed – right) and the dog in the final scene (you are laughing so much you can’t breathe – wrong).

Death, fear, morality, parenthood are pictured with a light sentiment understanding the matter of things and some of these normally-over-the-edge scenes are the best I’ve seen – except the dog. Tasteful (leaving out the two mentioned scenes and the product placement scenes), with a fine sense of storytelling and extremely well fine-tuned level of CGI and other visually catching elements. But there are serious bugs. And they haven’t been fixed.

First of all, the music by Cave and Ellis is nothing special. You may dispute: Easy to say! And I would tend to agree and show some respect: It is not the easy film to do a score for. The fact is that the music these two master did just proves it.

It is sponsored by Coca Cola and unfortunately this is one of the main things kept in my head a few hours after seeing it. Honestly, some scenes merge immediately in my head with War of The Worlds (ouch!) and many other no-name post-apocalyptic movies of last few years.

Last but not least, a version of this film ending 2 minutes prior the DOG SCENE would make it way more iconic and ballanced. At least for me.

To summarize it: Despite The Road is an outstanding film (not so hard to stand out), there is a gap between expected emotional impact (according the story) and the actual emotional impact you get. And I don’t know why. Maybe because of the few disturbing moments building an invisible but impenetrable wall between you and the father with the son. Maybe it was just me, maybe it is that part of the story which can be hardly captured on a silver screen – that difference between a book and a film. I don’t know, I didn’t read the book. Just a cheap presumption. Finally, sitting with a handful of popcorn, you are ready to suffer a bit more that you actually do. You want to be dragged into their inner world but in some moments you find difficult to keep the track. And the dog? Try to forget the dog. Or, try to love it. Up to your taste.