Moody promises end in frustration
FILM
The Rover(MA15+)
2 stars
Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson
DIRECTOR DAVID MICHOD
REVIEW MARK NAGLAZAS
In the best sci-fi fantasies we are taken into a world that's both strange and familiar, with curtains gradually being drawn back until we're hit by a final shock of recognition.
The most famous example is the end of Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston's astronaut Taylor gazes up at the Statue of Liberty and realises he was not on a crazy upside-down planet but Earth.
The outback-set road movie The Rover takes place a mere 10 years into the future so writer/director David Michod doesn't have to work too hard to explain how Australia came to be in a fallen state, with services collapsed, Chinese challenging English as the dominant language and US dollars replacing the local currency.
If we go down the current path of raping and pillaging the land, argues Michod, we will all be left like Guy Pearce's former farmer, roaming the barren landscape and struggling to stay alive to hang on to our meagre possessions and our humanity.
Unfortunately, once we've grasped that there has been a global economic collapse and nothing is working, The Rover ceases to be of interest as Michod fails to deepen our understanding of this wrecked world beyond saying that everyone is a victim.
While this tight-lipped tale of a man named Eric (Pearce) who sets out to get his car back after it's stolen by a band of desperadoes is packed with incident - the one-time cocky lays waste to anyone who stands between him and his goal - it quickly becomes dull because the drama reveals nothing about the world and little about the characters who inhabit it. It is like a blood-splattered Beckett play without the poetry and insight into the human condition.
All Michod's movie delivers are two full-blooded performances, with the dependable Pearce communicating the anger and hurt of a man who has suffered a great loss and is dying inside and Robert Pattinson, as a mentally challenged man left for dead by the gang who stole Eric's car, doing all in his power to blot out the memory of his wooden Twilight turn.
Pattinson, in particular, has been getting good notices for his role as the redneck Rey, adopting a Southern accent so incomprehensible that comparisons have been made to Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men (or, as a colleague quipped, the knuckleheads in Dude, Where's My Car?).
It is certainly an attention- grabbing performance but like the rest of this earnest yet empty movie does little to enrich the theme other than saying everything and everybody have been ruined.
Michod, as he revealed in his career-making debut feature Animal Kingdom, certainly has a facility with creating a menacing mood, using landscapes and an ominous score to good effect.
But in The Rover he neglects to tell a story of any interest, leaving us as bombed out as his characters. It is the year's biggest disappointment.
The Rover is now screening.
