My Thoughts on The Road Movie Trailer

If you read this blog, you know my fond admiration for The Road – Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel centered around a man, and his son, traveling an ashen, post-apocalyptic world.

Well, a couple months ago, my buddy Mac sent me the link to the new movie trailer for The Road. Before I give my opinion, I’ll let you watch it yourself:



The trailer in my opinion, sucks. It misrepresents McCarthy’s work and what the book, and movie, is all about. Quick action-packed edits. Images of world destruction via tornadoes, fires and floods. Followed by tense world-is-ending music with lots of symbols and percussion? What the fuck was that?

I read somewhere that Mr. Miramax Weinstein was cutting two different versions of the trailer. Well, I personally think he totally missed the boat on this one.

If you had the pleasure of reading the book, you know the pace of the story is purposefully slow, reflecting the long journey, the horrifying encounters and the cumbersome day-to-day inanity in this not-so-futuristic, desolate world.

Through this trailer, one conjures images of Armageddon, The Core, The Day After Tomorrow and Deep Impact. Not a film about a father and son trying to make ends meet in a world that's gone to shit. Not even remotely portraying the story of – as my buddy Mac said - “what it really means to be a father.”

I definitely would have taken a different approach than the bastardized trailer above:

• Limited dialogue.
• Slow, off-key guitar strumming an ominous folksy tune.
• Not-so-quick edits of the wasteland.
• Close-ups of horrified, saddened faces.
• The trailer would end with a profound voiceover quote from Viggo Mortensan, with father and son walking away from the camera into the desolate landscape that God ate up and puked on a plate.

Personally, I would have taken a more hands-off approach and the let the trailer breathe, almost like the following trailers below…



Or this one:



Or even this one: