Anyone who has ever been in a survival situation will know how difficult it can be to get the calories you need to stay alive. Without reliable access to food, the physiological changes in your body will basically make it impossible for you to move around like the protagonists in this film did. In order to keep the brain functioning, your body will start breaking itself down to provide essential nutrients to that vital organ. It is actually shocking how quickly you lose weight when that happens. As you go into starvation mode, any kind of physical effort becomes much more difficult and the **only** thing you are going to think about is food and finding food will become an all consuming obsession. Basically, it would be impossible for a man and a young boy to make the trek that the characters in the film did.
Once you find food, you would defend that food with your life because not eating is the same as dying. So the scene where the two of them abandons the bunker because they fear that someone may be on to them is essentially ridiculous. Only the well fed would prioritize escaping from potential enemies over a large stockpile of food. Anyone who has known starvation would never do that. Even if your intent is to move on, you would eat and rest and recover before doing so. This decision will be made by your body and not the frontal lobe of your brain.
The film was marred by the performance of the boy. Children who have known harsh privations are never whiny. Their sense of right and wrong are also radically different from kids who are raised with all the comforts and security of modernity. Under no circumstance would a child who has known hunger seek to share canned fruits which contain (in the scenario presented by the film) almost impossible to obtain sugars with a stranger because he wants to be one of the good guys. The boy carried much of the moral dialogue and it is here that I find the movie to be disappointingly lacking. How could a boy whose mother committed suicide and who has lived through long periods of starvation and witnessed the horrors of the kinds of violence that man can inflict on man continue to believe and espouse the sort of 'goodness' that a coddled kid from the fancy suburbs would? Some say this film is stark, but I find it simply too unrealistic.
The reason I gave this my two hours was because of Viggo and he did not disappoint. I only wish he had given the script more thought. But perhaps Viggo is himself a product of modern comforts and does not really understand what it means to fight to survive. If he had put himself into a survival situation with nothing but a few implements he could carry to find the food he needed for even just a week, I doubt if he would have agreed to this film.
Once you find food, you would defend that food with your life because not eating is the same as dying. So the scene where the two of them abandons the bunker because they fear that someone may be on to them is essentially ridiculous. Only the well fed would prioritize escaping from potential enemies over a large stockpile of food. Anyone who has known starvation would never do that. Even if your intent is to move on, you would eat and rest and recover before doing so. This decision will be made by your body and not the frontal lobe of your brain.
The film was marred by the performance of the boy. Children who have known harsh privations are never whiny. Their sense of right and wrong are also radically different from kids who are raised with all the comforts and security of modernity. Under no circumstance would a child who has known hunger seek to share canned fruits which contain (in the scenario presented by the film) almost impossible to obtain sugars with a stranger because he wants to be one of the good guys. The boy carried much of the moral dialogue and it is here that I find the movie to be disappointingly lacking. How could a boy whose mother committed suicide and who has lived through long periods of starvation and witnessed the horrors of the kinds of violence that man can inflict on man continue to believe and espouse the sort of 'goodness' that a coddled kid from the fancy suburbs would? Some say this film is stark, but I find it simply too unrealistic.
The reason I gave this my two hours was because of Viggo and he did not disappoint. I only wish he had given the script more thought. But perhaps Viggo is himself a product of modern comforts and does not really understand what it means to fight to survive. If he had put himself into a survival situation with nothing but a few implements he could carry to find the food he needed for even just a week, I doubt if he would have agreed to this film.