May brought us a release date and a trailer for the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. We now have some fresh clips from the film to take a look at.
Obviously, the last adaptation of McCarthy’s work, No Country for Old Men, was amazing and while I think I prefer The Road as a novel, it does present some difficulties in adapting that the formers doesn’t. Definitely going to check this out though, as McCarthy is simply one of my favorite novelists.
The Road stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Robert Duvall and is scheduled to hit theaters on October 16, 2009.
After that damnable trailer where global warming was posisted as the catastrophic event, I had written this off. Releasing clips is usually a sign of a weak and/or troubled movie, that the studio may know is not that great. I would say they are more good than bad, they hit a lot of the best moments from the book. Duvall is hitting the right notes, so is Dillahunt. The book is a lot bleaker than these clips, I think they should have pushed the color palette way into the gray, instead of the warm glow of fires and wood tones.
By “presents some problems no country didn’t” I presume you mean a bleakness that would be insupportable in a major studio movie aimed at a general audience? Because that seems to be at the heart of the apprehension of everyone who’s actually read the book–that they won’t have the balls to actually recreate the world of the book, as opposed to a kinder gentler and therefore lesser version.