I watched it in a cinema in the Philippines where there was only one other patron. He walked out. People in the Philippines do not kiss 141 pesos goodbye lightly. He shuffled out half way through and I would have followed except I wanted to write this review. I was also strangely fascinated to see if it could get any more pretentious and if the screenplay could possibly continue to get more and more vacuous. There are no redeeming features in this lazy movie whatsoever. The only reason we knew it was some years after some unspecified apocalyptic event was that the screen told us in the beginning. You could have told the same story without the apocalypse. It tried to mystify the audience but it did not fool me. It was an indolent film. I think the only reason they set it post apocalypse was so that they had an excuse to explain the many loose ends and to get away with conning the audience. It would use sudden brutal shootings to get your attention but these shootings had no real reason for happening. They seemed to be there to imitate Tarantino but I assure you David Michod who wrote this pretentious drivel is no Tarantino. It was just dumb and unconvincing while masquerading as an art house movie. It was a South Australian movie. I was brought up there so I had a stake in liking it. It was filmed in a very unattractive looking part of the outback so you didn't even get the beautiful scenery of Australia's stunning outback (where I now live incidentally). It looked like northern South Australia just south of where it starts to get incredibly beautiful. I don't know what the long freight train was doing in the movie except I guess it saved a lot of cost to film it. If it was post apocalypse the number of carriages in it were far too many. It was going somewhere with an enormous amount of cargo. Some apocalypse. It just did not add up. It was a low budget movie it seemed with low outcomes entertainment wise. Many other things didn't add up just take your pick. Pearce mumbling in a thick Aussie accent- one I have myself actually- did not cut it with me. It was not exotic to me just prosaic. But that would be OK if it meant something or added to the movie. It did not. In fact it is one of the worst screenplays I have ever encountered. Guy would just ask a vapid question; the interlocutor would not answer it and so Guy would repeat it. The person would repeatedly refuse to not answer it and around it went again with Guy trying to look like a macho man. IT WAS PATHETIC WITHOUT THE PATHOS. This happened over and over. I mean some lines were so pathetic I nearly laughed out loud (with derision). Some guy points a rifle at the unarmed Pearce in the middle of nowhere and Pearce says something like if you don't give me my car back I am going to sit in that truck until you do. Guy Pearce mumbles in an incomprehensible (even for me who knows the accent) "strine" slang. Then Robert Pattinson (who did his best with this atrocious screenplay) mumbles back in deep southern USA slang which I understood better than my own accent from Pearce. Robert did try. He would be fine in a half decent movie. The appalling proposition put by the grandma (Gillian Jones) was not only disgusting and despicable but utterly irrelevant to anything preceding or following it. I suppose it was supposed to be edgy and arty. But really it was just repulsively irrelevant. There was nothing to be relevant to. Her prosaic delivery made it even worse. How people can have the nerve to serve up this reprehensible drivel is beyond me. The presence of the Chinese people seemed disconnected to any semblance of a story. The two indigenous outback people (I work with traditional Aboriginal people so I know what I am talking about) was pure cinematic tokenism. Both of them appeared individually in scenes. In the remote bush one rarely sees indigenous people wandering around alone; possible but it did not ring true. The premise of the movie was the protagonist trying to get his stolen car. He kept asking people out in the middle of nowhere where the three men with his car were. How would they know? Honestly folks if you lived there you would understand just how stupid this was. Its a bit hard to explain if you don't know the area. There was no suspense at all in the movie. None at all. This is down there with one of the worst movies I have ever seen and being South Australian I really wanted it to be good.
Review of The Rover
