The Rover (Movie Review)

To pitch something as post-apocalyptic is beginning to carry the weight of moody adolescent poetry. When AMC and the CW, along with the occasional network TV programming, start running grim, “gritty” dystopian survivalist shows its safe to posit mainstream culture is transfixed on the demise of Western society, bordering on some mass auto-erotic asphyxiation that pushes us to the edge of destruction before final catharsis.

As Tom Cruise once said: “Live. Die. Repeat.”

David Michôd’s “The Rover”, however, approaches the material with a razor sharp attention to its characters and genre history. Fresh off the near universal critical acclaim of his gangster family drama “Animal Kingodm” Michôd’s latest features Guy Pearce as a lone drifter named Eric who is on a path of violent retribution to recover his car from a group of outlaws. With the assistance of one of their wounded brothers, Rey (Rober Pattinson), Eric takes to the desolate, scorched outback searching for the thieves and navigating a hopeless post-collapse world.

While the film doesn’t offer a genre redefining moment that Cuarón’s “Children of Men” did, “The Rover” does the necessary work of pushing the boundaries of its material to elucidate the conversation these types of art are attempting to have.

Guy Pearce continues his streak of killing all the roles Johnny Depp thinks his playing. After taking on John Hillcoat’s “The Proposition”, “Lawless” and adaptation of the “The Road” Pearce has earned the gaunt-go-to character actor seal of approval. Here his boiling menace and bitter misanthropy seethes under a dust-plastered visage that reads like a cruel history book. Even the basins of water he bathes with can’t wash off his past, mostly because he scrubs only so hard.

Pattinson is remarkable as Rey, alternating between tweaker gesticulations and blank introspection that makes audible whatever caged rodent is running the wheel inside his skull. For his part, Rey remains the last piece of humanity Eric drags with him across the desert. Though first assumed to be equal parts simpleton and maniac, Pattinson’s performance and Michôd’s direction reveal just how much more human Rey can be in the face of collapse.

Inevitably “The Rover” draws comparisons to Westerns. Its iconography of secluded pockets of civilization (or barbarism depending on which side you’re on) swallowed within a dusted, Martian landscape is the stuff of more than a century of genre. Eric embodies the Westerner’s steely-eyed stoicism, penchant for violence, and inability to fully reorient to Institution based civilization. But where the Western existed to draw and test those areas of civic and moral codes, Michôd keenly observes those decisions get made in split seconds with ramifications we cannot outrun.

What sets “The Rover” above its generic counterparts is Michôd’s ability to not only embrace the narrative’s generic attributes but to also find a real, human conversation about knowledge and identity in a post-industrial world. Tense, despondent, and awesome, “The Rover” is a character driven lament for our age.