The Rover

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: David Michot/Starring: Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson

David Michot follows up his terrific, gritty Animal Kingdom with an equally gritty and violent The Rover, which he co-wrote with actor/writer Joel Edgerton.

Following a global catastrophe, known to the audience as the Collapse, we find denizens of rural Australia surviving in a lawless, economically-ravaged environment where basic necessities are scarce and pricey and law-enforcement is almost a rumor. Michot's near-future Australia is an amoral, vicious, dirty, and unforgiving place. The story takes place 10 years after said disaster and the world we see looks much like the post-apocalyptic decay and rot seen previously in films like The Road Warrior and A Boy and His Dog but with a generous serving of Cormac McCarthy's The Road to darken the proceedings. We never see urban Australia, only deserty, dusty villages and citizens who are the socially and economically marginalized.

In this savage milieu is Eric (the always terrific Guy Pearce), a man who looks haggard and unwashed, with a Sisyphean boulder-size chip on his shoulder though we don't know how it got there. He stops at a decrepit bar for a drink, only to have his car stolen by three men with guns. Seeing his car receding in the dusty distance, he manages to extricate the truck the men left behind from tangled cables and junk. In pursuit of the men, he tries to bump them off the road but is unsuccessful. After the men stop, he demands his vehicle be returned then attacks one of the men, only to get knocked out in the process. He wakes to find the truck and himself abandoned in a field but after a scan of the immediate area, he finds the keys. His obsessive pursuit of the vehicle continues as he makes stops along the way, questioning people who look as ragged as he--and sometimes worse--as to the men's whereabouts.

Michot's pointed allegory on the current global, economic decline couldn't be more obtrusive. We even see the economic fallout from the Collapse; all transactions are conducted in American currency.

Among the characters Eric encounters, it is interesting to see not only Caucasians, but Asians, Aborigines, Africans and even Texans, whose peculiar prescence in the outback will be addressed shortly.

Eric stops at what is a sort of a brothel of young men. In questioning the odd madame about the the men who stole his vehicle, he receives little but enigmatic, useless information. Shortly thereafter, he tries to buy a gun from a diminutive man but when he balks at the little man's asking price, Eric shoots him in the head--a very shocking and disturbing development, to say the least. Eric's determination to achieve his goal, by whatever aggressive means necessary, becomes conspicuously clear.

It is also clear that the authorities' response to the violence is ineffectual or remote or both. Or so it seems. Hot on Eric's tail is what looks like military law enforcement in Humvees and camouflage.

Along the way, Eric happens upon the brother of one of the men who stole his car, named Rey (an excellent Robert Pattinson). Rey is bleeding in his side from a gunshot wound sustained in a shoot-out, after which he was left behind by his brother. When Eric discovers Rey's brother was involved in the car-theft, he takes him along as a kind of hostage, pressing him for his brother's whereabouts.

Eric has little time or inclination to be chatty in his pursuit of the three men while Rey, a slow-witted man with a Texan accent, is more prone to idle talk. Hearing Pattinson's accent is unusual but he executes it with some authenticity. When the taciturn, taut-jawed Eric asks Rey why he happens to be in Australia, the latter mumbles something about 'mining,' which speaks volumes about how the economic collapse has left many desperate and itinerant.

Eric's mysterious obsession with recovering his car isn't revealed until the end, which makes his single-minded pursuit all the more puzzling. What fuels his rage? Is it his disgust with everything the world has become? It might be tempting to dismiss Eric as a nihilist but that would be an oversimplification of his worldview. A clue emerges later but I'll refrain from revealing it here.

I was a big fan of Michot's Animal Kingdom, with its often gruesome and unsentimental look at the criminal underbelly of Australian society and I'm drawn to his world again. It isn't often we see a place depicted with such despair, where compassion is mostly a liability and violence always a means to an end. Michot doesn't give us the desolate beauty of Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout or the sinister, surreal loveliness of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock but deserty decay and waste that wants to devour home and human alike. To match Michot's stygian imagery, we have Antony Partos' dark, haunting score as the film's ideal companion; understated and edgy.

Pearce can always be counted on to assume a fascinating character and play the hell out of it, which he does here while Pattinson shows us he is distancing himself further from his teen-dream Twilight character. Rey's bodily tics and slow, halting speech are characteristics Pattinson wears rather than merely affects.

I find Michot's dark, violent worlds worthy of exploration. In The Rover he doesn't shy away from making a political statement about a place and time we might inhabit if we can't avert self-destructive tendencies. I hope the world has the wisdom and compassion to avoid a condition that looks and feels like Michot's nightmare.