Yahoo Movies has gone live with the trailer for John Hillcoat’s “The Road” and, true to this week’s intriguing piece from Esquire, the clip does indeed feature a misleading opening suggesting that the film gives us a peek at what causes the story’s post-apocalyptic wasteland. It even goes as far as to specifically credit “one event” for the downfall of civilization. Oh, come on, people!
For those of you familiar with the sparse prose of the Cormac McCarthy book, there is never any reason given for why the forests are alight, why vegetation has ceased, and why most humans have resorted to traveling in packs with cannibals.
The film, as one of us has previously seen in a very rough, unfinished form, concerns a man and his son as they make their way across the barren wasteland in an effort to prolong suffering and starvation in order to survive. The trailer, however, seems to depict a father-son duo in a race against time to stop an evil menace that has ravaged the world, while also finding space for the controversial footage depicted in the Esquire piece, context-less news footage of various natural disasters that doesn’t in any way appear in the novel. Also misleading is the suggestion that Viggo Mortensen’s father figure succumbs to some sort of bloodlust, and that Charlize Theron’s wife character is a part of the main story, not only featured in cryptic flashbacks and dream sequences. The trailer’s build-up is especially curious, particularly the match-cut of Michael K. Williams brandishing a gun and a random explosion before the title card. A random explosion that, it goes without saying, is not at all in the film.
The Weinsteins’ have gotten a lot of flack over their treatment of this film, specifically in screening it in a poorly edited version late last year before removing it from the schedule, leading to speculation that the film was going to emerge from the post-production process as a total lemon. This trailer, while being the antithesis of the cut we saw last year (which definitely had problems), certainly suggests there’s more than a little dickery going on behind the scenes on the part of the Weinsteins. But then again, their job is to sell movies and we get that.
We’ll be able to judge for ourselves when “The Road” hits theaters on October 16th.