Is The Road In Trouble?

A couple of reviews of the Road I have scoured whilst surfing movie sites in between bouts of stealing their ideas, have been decidedly or at least gingerly negative. 6 months ago, I would have called this a lock to be my favorite film of 2010 (love those British release dates) in part because if the terrific source novel from No Country For old Men writer Cormac McCarthy; in part because of my love for post-apocalyptic fiction, in all forms of media, but particularly film; and in part because it comes from John Hillcoat, the director of the distinctly under-rated Aussie western The Proposition which was the kind of film to make you an instant lifelong fan of anything the director puts out. But. Bad reviews are seemingly easy to ignore for the majority of humanity, but being the dangerously obssessive consumer of film criticism that I am, its left me concerned. Not in a I'm going to rip the shit out of you, your mother and your cat in the comments section kind of way, but perhaps in the way viewers felt about half way through Godfather part three, that sense of docile disappointment and sense of loss. Almost as if we were denied the movie we felt we deserved and rather then make us angry it just makes us resign in depressing acceptance.

Now this is merely speculation and the movie is sitting at an OK but not great 70% on rotten tomatoes, and if I find the movie amazing, and I can't tell you how much I hope I do, this is all moot. But hype, being the son of a bitch that it is, is hard to ignore. Be it good or bad you go in with it ever present in your mind and just as we'll all take our seats next month expecting Avatar to once and for all deck to the face James Cameron's career, I'll go into this film whenever that might be expecting disappointment, which in many ways ruins it before its begun.