Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: The Rover

The Rover: $$

• Written and directed by David Michod.
• Starring Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy.

PHIL vs BILL
This vaguely futuristic Australian road thriller is set 10 years after “the collapse”, when people’s lives appear as barren as the outback. Guy Pearce plays a loner who’ll stop at nothing to retrieve his car from the clutches of thieves escaping the scene of a violent crime where they’ve left to die one of their own (Robert Pattinson). The two victims forge an unlikely bond as they embark upon a grim, brutal, bloody odyssey across a hostile, desolate landscape that ends tragically but with a corker punchline. Technically and visually The Rover astonishes but the bare-bones narrative betrays the inspiration director/co-writer David Michod (Animal Kingdom) reveals in the extras: a movie about cars. — Phil Wakefield.

Australia leads the way in three areas of human endeavour – sports, politics, and bullshit.

It is a continent abounding with politicians of perverse bastard genius at every level of governance, a murderous, unforgiving sporting ethos, and a film industry which has just given us a super duper Mad Max for a new generation.

(For a trivia point, the original 1979 Mad Max was banned outright in NZ for four years.)

Films, for the sake of this review of The Rover, go under the catch-all classification of bullshit, covering entertainment in all its forms including particularly hilarious forms of criminality that appeal to the jocular stream of sadism that runs through Aussie culture.

But there have got to be misses along the way to the many hits, as Chopper Read might have said.

The Rover is one of these misses.

It’s not a terrible movie. It’s not even bad. Indeed on a particularly slow day when you don’t want rapid plot developments or any great exposition of mysterious goings on, you can sit back and watch as people drive the roads of South Australia seeking a car. And occasionally shooting one another.

It all takes place 10 years after some kind of economic collapse. It is never said why, but things are grim. Well, grimmer than usual in South Australia. US currency is the only money accepted, there seems to be some central government left in Sydney, and a giant ore train guarded by mercenaries rumbles across the road at some stage. But suffice to say it is a world in decay, economic and moral.

Guy Pearce is on a mission to reclaim his Holden that got pinched by a gang after they had a shoot-out with Aussie troops. He meets Robert Pattison, a halfwit southern US miner whose brother is in the gang that left him for dead with a gunshot wound.

Together, they track down the gang, taking in the bleak beauty of the desert (beautifully shot by Natasha Braier) and killing a few people along the way, not all of whom really need to die.

It is lucky that 94 per cent of the movie is watching Guy Pearce wander around looking he’s being forced to suck on a piece of cat poo as he pulls this off spectacularly well.

It takes its time to let things happen in a laconic, westerny kind of way, but at some stage someone needed to grab the writer and director (both of whom are David Michod) and shake him till bubbles of snot come out his nose and scream into his face: “Put in some more goddam action and a point to it all. Don’t waste 102 minutes of my life on a shaggy dog story, you bastard!”

Pattison is ok but comes perilously close to going “full retard” while also doing a fair impersonation of Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate. (Explanatory links below).

It is more meh than merde, but your life will be no poorer for not seeing this.

However [spoiler alert] it does have the best depiction of a midget being shot in the head at point blank range with a large calibre handgun in a post-apocalyptic dystopian Australian movie that I have seen all week.

The extras include a commentary by Michod, a Q and A with principals, and a thing called Something Elemental which has comments from cast and crew about The Rover’s genesis, symbolism and themes.

It is a good reminder that if ever the world’s supplies of wank start to run down, pointing a camera and a microphone in the direction of art house filmmakers will cause the reservoir to overflow in great rapidity.

Robert Pattison as Reynolds in The Rover

John Reynolds as Torgo (ex-Mystery Science Theatre 3000)