***/****
Ten years after ‘The Collapse’, a
band of thieves steal a car from the roadside and disappear over the horizon.
Little do they realise that their new car belongs to a ruthless loner, Eric, a
man who thinks nothing of violence and death. Pursuing the thieves across the
bleak Australian landscape, Eric meets Rey, a brother of one of the thieves,
and the pair form an uneasy partnership.
To say that The Rover is pretty bleak would be something of an understatement –
this is a merciless, depressing study into Man’s tendency towards violence when
He has no rules or structure to govern Him: crucified bodies line the empty
highways; everyone carries a weapon and is unafraid to murder anyone who gets
in the way; and all humanity seems lost. It’s also about the dangers of not
wearing sun cream and going long periods of time without brushing your teeth.
Guy Pearce is Eric, a hardened and violent man travelling across the barren
wasteland of Australia. It has been well documented that David Michôd (the
director and one of the screenwriters) wrote the part of Eric specifically for
Pearce and it is hard to imagine anyone else in the role – Pearce looks every
bit the part with grey, straggly hair, sun-aged skin, drab clothes, but with
bright, dangerous eyes. Robert Pattinson is Rey, the half-wit brother, who Eric
wants to kill but has to take along with him in order to track down his car.
This is without doubt the best performance I have seen Pattinson give – he is
wholly realistic in his staggered speech and awkward mannerisms, and even the
accent is pretty good. It helps that Eric repeats most of Rey’s lines as it was
difficult to understand him at times, but Pattinson really stood out in what is
quite a complex role.
There is a refreshing lack of
over-emotional backstory, with no flashbacks and no detailed exploration of how
each man came to be in the place he is now in. In fact, even with the snippets
of information we are given, it seems likely that neither man is telling the
truth – we learn about the men through their actions rather than their words.
Ambiguity is central to the film; we know nothing about ‘The Collapse’ (and are
spared any forced exposition), nor a great deal about any of the characters, or
indeed anything – this is just a small snap-shot into the life of Eric who
knows what is happening and knows what he has to do without needing to explain.
Eric and Rey wrack up a pretty impressive body count by the end (there are
blood-splatters galore) but whereas the camera observes the violence at the
beginning of the film, we look away from the headshots and moments of death
later on, instead focusing on the faces of Rey and Eric and then turning to see
the body. This doesn’t mean that the violence becomes less shocking, but
instead the violence comes to mean something, whereas it was merely a normal
action for Eric at the start.
I went as a group of four to see The Rover, and half of us liked it (if
you can indeed ‘like’ a film such as this), whilst the other two hated it,
calling it ‘pointless’, ‘without merit’ and wholly ‘unentertaining’. I agree
that the film is perhaps not ‘entertaining’ in the conventional sense – if you
go to the cinema to be amused and uplifted then this probably isn’t the film
for you – but I did want to know what would happen to the characters and I was
interested throughout. If you do go, just be warned that the wholly depressing
tone does not lift throughout, so you may want to do something cheerful
afterwards.
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