subject: Watch The Road Movie Online Free Review [print this page] "The Road," the highly anticipated and much-delayed adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, aspires for greatness. And in many ways it succeeds, from its stunning visual design and sensitive performances to its overarching tone of mournful spiritual reckoning. But like "No Country for Old Men," which is also based on a McCarthy book, the philosophical and aesthetic seriousness of "The Road," while admirable, serves mostly to point up the essentially shallow mannerisms of the source material they serve.Among McCarthy's blessings here is Viggo Mortensen, who delivers a haunting, deeply felt performance as a nameless man leading his young son (newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) through a landscape charred by an unspecified disaster. The terrain they travel is limned in grays and browns, barren trees crashing to the ground with indiscriminate hopelessness. It's also dotted with roving bands of survivors reduced to cannibalism, a last resort to which the man and the boy steadfastly refuse to succumb.
Everything about the film seems disconnected in this way shocky and post-traumatic. This is what happens: A father and a son walk from point A to point B through a desolate landscape. Cities are deserted. People-zombies, some of them hungry for human flesh, stare out from abandoned office buildings and sometimes hunt other people. It's always cloudy. Everything is dead. There is no color left in anything not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. Ruined, wrecked, used up it is our world, consumed at its edges by fire, at its center by rot.Sounds awful, because it goddamned well is. But it's awful, too, as in full of awe. Awful as in you cannot avert your gaze. It's hard not to watch a fire.
When they do move, the father and the son progress through a quietly seething dream, a world at its end. When they run from danger, they clank and rustle and seem wetly destined to never get away. When the father grips the boy's mouth to quiet him, it is too rough. Rivers seem to be icy sloughs of poison. Yet they swim. They are a father and son. They carry two bullets. Anytime the man turns his back on the boy or separates from him, it feels in a way that scary, apocalyptic movies often do as if everything will end. But in those movies, the end never really comes. You know that going in, because generally those movies just flirt with the apocalypse, just offer a little look-see at a tidal wave or a nuclear blast.The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.
You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. Not because it may be important. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. Not because it horrifies. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. All of that is so. Don't see it just because you loved the book. The movie stands alone. Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. A story without guarantees. In every moment even the last one you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it's more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend.Watch free movies online
The movie opens up, as one might guess, on a lonely stretch of road. But rather than being predictable, it's suspenseful makes you wonder what's around the next bend. Let's just say, it's not good. In a good way.Lurking in the atmosphere of that winding way is an angry apparition with an ax to grind and people to kill. Gruesome and no-holds-barred when it comes to the harrowing aspects, The Road is unusually effective in its emotional resonance as well. Usually, when we watch the doomed meet their demises in various brutal ways, we horror hounds are pretty much desensitized, and just curious to see the murder set-pieces unfold. In this case, however, one actually feels a vicarious tinge of the terror as the young women are painfully terrorized, tortured and killed (anyone who's read a true crime book, such as BTK by Robert Beattie or almost anything by Ann Rule, will know what I'm talking about there's a fine balance between victim and victimizer, and getting to know a little bit about both is the key to maintaining suspense).
The plot itself isn't anything to write home about (however, it is review-writing worthy!). The story follows a 12 year old cold case which is reopened when three teenagers on a road trip go mysteriously missing. As a new investigative unit explores the facts of the crime, unexplainable supernatural phenomena starts to rise and arouses more questions than any mortal could possibly answer. So, yeah The Road is about a serial killer with mommy issues who acts out on unsuspecting teens over a number of years, and so on kind of Psycho'esque, but there is a lot more dimension to the movie than just that.
First of all, the cinematography (by Laranas, who also wrote, produced and edited this pup) is stunning. It's really special and showy, without being ostentatious. It's masterful, but understated. What I love best about Laranas' DP'ing is his embracing of negative space and his effective use of focus. (His style, though less-colorful, reminds me quite a bit of Christopher Doyle's.) Secondly, the horror effects and fright-factor on the ghosts and dead bodies, are top-notch. They're gory and gooey, without being grand guignol over-the-top, nor too squirm-inducing in crime-scene realism. Lastly, the casting is perfection the actors are real, believable, smart, relatable and likeable. When they are in peril, it matters.
Having heaped all that praise, I will say The Road is not a zing a minute, and I did find the resolution a bit too pat. However, it's not often one watches a chiller of any kind which has actual thrills, trepidation, gore, and gravitas so, I recommend The Road to anyone who's into more than just the cheap thrill and wants something cinematically spooky to cuddle with on a dark night.
