The Rover Review

[Westside Steve]

The Rover

Porchlight

R 102 min

 

I really had very little idea what to expect with this one, most likely due to the fact that there was almost no promotion as well as it being an Australian production. We know that Cleveland Detroit and Pittsburgh have some downtown scenery that comes in handy when making movies requiring city shots. If you are shooting in a generic European city Prague is popular. Australia seems to be the destination of choice for burning and bleak desert perfectly suited for the post apocalypse like we found with the MAD MAX series. Writer director David Michod has taken that style and grafted it to the depressingly barren style of one of my favorites, Cormac McCarthy. Imagine a MAD MAX/THE ROAD hybrid along with just a hint of the ugly surrealism of Jim Jarmusch, and you have THE ROVER.

In this near future society has all but broken down and human beings nearly feral. Every character seems to be a wanderer, a rover if you will, with very little sense of direction save for the primal desire for survival and revenge.

After some sort of fracas a gang has hit the highway leaving Rev (Robert Pattison) behind. He has been wounded and will assumedly die. When their vehicle gets stuck they steal another and continue on their journey. The stolen vehicle is the only possession of another drifter named Eric (Guy Pearce) who makes it his quest to track them down. Oddly the vehicle they have left behind seems to be in perfect operating order and is fairly easily freed from its situation. Lots of things don't make sense and this is one. Eric finds the wounded member, take him to a woman who stitches him up and forces him to guide them to where the outlaws have probably gone. For the rest of the film it’s kind of a gruesome buddy picture as Eric and Rev travel through an uninviting and dangerous world.

As I said before there are quite a few unexplained circumstances. I did wonder exactly what worldwide disaster was to blame for the societal demise and how Pattinson, whose character is Rev, a seemingly Retarded Appalachian, came to be in Australia. Not very much in the way of motivation is ever explained here and I'm assuming that's done to give the perception of existentialism. Of course it could just as easily be a pretentious script meant to seem deeper than it is. You can decide. If in fact it's been inspired by either THE ROAD or MAD MAX it has fallen in a bit short on both counts. I was, however, glad to see Pattison shift gears from embarrassing but lucrative TWILIGHT series.

C

WSS