Matt's just not feeling it for THE ROAD trailer!

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Earlier this week Tom Chiarella at Esquire Magazine, presumably the only guy on the planet to have seen the first adapted Cormac McCarthy novel since No Country For Old Men classified the 16.10.09 released post-apocalyptic thriller The Road as being "the most important movie of the year". That kind of studio exec's marketing dream is too good for The Weinsteins NOT to capitalise on and unsurprisingly, just a few days later we have a full length trailer online for our viewing pleasure. Now, before you go any further, any trailer with the unfortunate tag of "most important movie of the year" is going to fail at the first huddle, it will never live up. No trailer is ever as good as the one for The Phantom Menace (similarly, a trailer whose final movie would never live up to those few minutes of footage). Just bare that in mind.

I'm positive this movie will be better than it looks come October, I'm certain it's going to be killer. Not a run of the mill action thriller as advertised. The lack of heart, the lack of rhythm, the lack of a reason to care is partly because of a misconceived notion that putting in as many glorious apocalyptic shots of a world going to hell and ramping up the action scenes as much as possible might remind people of I Am Legend, a movie which made $585 million worldwide and the beginning environmental disaster newsreel footage might trigger memories of The Day After Tomorrow, a $544 million worldwide smash.

The apocalyptic fest I can forgive but the newsreel footage is something else entirely, though as Esquire mentioned this week, that was all Bob Weinstein and won't make the final cut of the film. Thank God!

Let's not blame director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) for that. However, the bumping up of the Charlize Theron part from the novel... that's all him. The buck stops with him on that one.