The Road: Talk About Bad Marketing

1st June, 2010.

Once in a blue moon, there comes a film that marketing departments love.

They’re the kind of films that sell themselves, in other words.

Many films strike me as being easy to market.

Well …

Maybe not easy to market, but certainly easy enough to put through the marketing mill: insert actors, posters, marketing — and the movie — in one end, and sell tickets at the other.

They will possibly an Oscar or two, if you’ve get it right: which only adds to the marketing buzz.

But Movie Night Adrian and I watched possibly the one film, tonight, that its producers marketing department must have had nightmares about.

Well …

Possibly not nightmares, but certainly went in the wrong direction with.

I know.

I’ve actually looked for the relevant trailer on YouTube.

And — if you believe what you saw — you’d expect that The Road — with Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee — was a thrilling action adventure, with bombs, sex, cannibals and Charlize Theron, on every spare surface.

Well …

Charlize Theron’s in it: but the trailer doesn’t tell you everything.

Let me re-phrase that: the shop-window trailer is definitely a bit of misapplied hype.

The Road see’s Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee as an unnamed father and son, trying desperately to reach the coast, after an unspecified apocalypse.

And having to cope with what has to be the most realistic post-apocalypse I think I’ve seen in some time …

~≈†≈~

Do you remember the last time I mentioned Kevin D, and his wife, Sarah … ?

They were down, a couple of weeks ago, and managed to bring a copy of The Prestige along with them: certainly a film that’s worth watching, I think.

We actually managed to have an interesting natter about Avatar: my point was that Cameron and co could have spent a touch more time thinking through one or two details about the Na’vi home-world’s ecology a little better.

To quote Terry Pratchett — the only writer to include a sewer system as part of a fantasy world’s background — “Sometimes, you have to do these things from the bottom up.”

You have to think these things through, logically, in other words

~≈†≈~

Which is sort of my point, about this film.

Going by what we saw on-screen tonight, The Road isn’t a big budget, effects laden blockbuster.

Well … not one that’s full of obvious special effects.

The Road is not Star Wars: it’s a low budget drama that actually tries to look long and hard at the effects of a major disaster*.

By looking at how a father and son try to cope with living in a world that’s dramatically changed from how it was.

~≈†≈~

Very much so, actually.

This is not a post-apocalyptic action film in the style of Mad Max.

Not at all.

The Road is a film that sees two people who’ve survived a huge tragedy and find hope in small miracles: finding an expected supply of food, meeting someone non-threatening, finding a thief who isn’t as bad as they’d thought.

But also magnifies the obstacles they face: ravaging gangs of people not afraid to be cannibals, a climate that’s against them.

~≈†≈~

I’m going to be honest, here.

I’m going to get myself off to bed, in a few minutes.

But I’ll leave you with an opinion, before I do.

The Road isn’t going to be a film that grabs everyone.

But I think that if you liked Moon or Valhalla Rising … ?

Then The Road could well have a lot of appeal.

Just ignore the trailers for it, though. They really aren’t a good advert.

* One which isn’t specified, as I think I mentioned, but looks to me as if it’s either a nuclear winter, or some form of environmental disaster thats produced a similar result.