Plot Summary
Father and son journeying together toward the sea across a post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a great, unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and almost all life on Earth.
Credits
Director
Movie Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes
TOMATOMETER
75%- Reviews Counted: 197
- Fresh: 147
- Rotten: 50
- Average Rating: 6.9/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Rotten: Hillcoat certainly provides the requisite seriousness, but what the movie lacks is an underlying sense of innocence, a sense that, however far humanity has sunk, there is at least some chance of rising again.
Fresh: Hillcoat does his best, and for the most part, he succeeds. The horrifically desolate landscape and the drab greys and cobalt blues of the scarred sky pervade every shot.
Fresh: The film is so beautiful. In this sort of stark, austere grim way it's incredibly beautiful.
Fresh: Considering it's not so much what happens but how it happens, Hillcoat has made a dynamic film of great impact
Customer Reviews
Must be able to step outside into the Sun after watching movie.
One must be able to step outside into the Sun after watching this movie. That's how desperate, dreary, depressing, deathly, and whatever other words the thesaurus will come up with to describe the hopeless feeling this movies leaves the viewer with.
I will start out with the problems:
1. Get rid of the music. It has no place in this world. The story goes so far as to explain music has no place in this world and yet the simple mistake of putting music in there was made. No Country For Old Men had no music, why couldn't this one? Also, the music included is entirely inappropriate because it ends up feeling sentimental instead of like some kind of disease is strangling the life out of you as slowly as possible.
2. Word of mothers who will have children in this world, only to eat them, barely sneaks into this movie. It should have been a very important scene in the movie because of how well it shows the difference between our world and the one McCarthy Wrote. Babies are not made for survival of the species; there is no hope for survival of the species, only ones own survival, and so cannibalism in some extreme form is practiced.
The good:
1. Amazing atmosphere. Not for children. This can easily TRAUMATIZE children. I know I am scarred for life by McCarthy's story.
2. For myself a son of a father who has always been there, I can instantly relate to the main characters in this movie. I have read in an interview, Cormac McCarthy received many letters from Fathers who found it an extremely profound experience and were deeply connected to the main characters.
3. Fantastic visuals of this dying world. No explanation is needed for why the world is dying, it just is, which goes back to 1.
4. The sense of paranoia and fear is extremely well placed at times.
5. Some key scenes were implemented very well. Such as the 'cellar', the 'old traveller', and the 'thief'.
6. Viggo gives it everything. He looks and acts emaciated, starving for a chance to eat food for both the body and the mind. He wants to forget the old world, yet famished for new fond memories, he cannot forget.
I highly recommend this movie with one caveat, be able to step outside into the sun after you're done watching it, because you're going to need it.
So Oscar worthy
A beautiful story of survival and the love between a father and son in an otherwise loveless hell-on-earth. I was deeply moved by this film and was shocked when it was ignored by the Oscars. I assume it was because of the brutally bleak nature of the film, which at times is hard to watch, but really no more disturbing than humanity in it's current state.
Amazing
Will stay with you days after you've watched it.
Viewers Also Bought
- The Way Back
- Peter Weir
- View In iTunes
- The Ghost Writer (2010)
- Roman Polanski
- View In iTunes
- Crazy Heart
- Scott Cooper
- View In iTunes
- Brothers (2009)
- Jim Sheridan
- View In iTunes
