This 10-Year-Old Robert Pattinson Film Is a Post-Apocalyptic Western Hidden Gem

Summary

  • Robert Pattinson’s career quickly evolved beyond the Twilight franchise into challenging indie roles.
  • The Rover features Pattinson as a complex character within a bleak, post-collapse world, beautifully realized by auteur David Michôd and co-starring Guy Pearce and Scoot McNairy.
  • The film blends Western and sci-fi elements while exploring human survival and finding meaning in a world that’s already ended.



Despite being one of the last classic Hollywood heartthrobs, conquering the minds and poster space of an entire generation, Robert Pattinson has never been an actor who could be pinned down. Starting as a musician with no aspirations to tread the boards, Pattinson found himself behind the scenes of the Barnes Theatre Company of London at the encouragement of his dad, to help with his shyness. A short time later, he was starring in the plays, and by 18 he had a German made-for-TV movie (Ring of the Nibelungs) and cut scenes in 2004 Reese Witherspoon historical drama Vanity Fair under his belt. It was, of course, his role as Cedric Diggory in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that broke Pattinson out on the world stage before he became one of the world’s most popular humans for his starring role in 2008’s generationally-defining Twilight.


By the time that series released its final film four years later with 2012’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, Robert Pattinson had become a household name worldwide, with a rabid fandom the likes of which can only be compared to people like Prince, The Beatles or previous dominant heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. Numerous publications had named him among (if not the) sexiest men alive and he had also made it onto lists of the top influential people from venerable institutions like Time and Forbes. Despite his undeniable superstardom, what many may not know is that Pattinson continued to work on the side of his massive franchise, and almost without exception, the roles he took then and through the rest of his career have been challenging, interesting parts in weird indie films. A real talent, Pattinson’s non-franchise work is generally exceptional and surprising, spanning an impressive spread of character types and genres, and among Pattinson’s best performances is his immediate follow-up to his Twilight run, 2014’s post-apocalyptic Western The Rover, co-starring the amazing Guy Pearce and directed by a man who is quietly becoming the next king of Australian cinema.



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  • Robert Pattinson’s career took off with huge mainstream roles, but he’s always had a major interest in artistic films.
  • Cosmopolis was Pattinson’s first “weird” movie, a Cronenberg film in which Pattison plays a strange billionaire who drives around New York City in a high-tech limo.
  • The Rover was Pattinson’s first role after The Twilight Saga ended, and it showcases his immense talent in a post-apocalyptic Western setting.


Pattinson’s made it pretty clear just from the list of directors he’s worked with that he’s not really the perfectly coiffed pretty boy semi-himbo that Twilight and his utterly out-of-control 2000s popularity made him out to be. After years of facing the unending attention of TMZ and tabloid magazines like Seventeen and J-14, it became clear through the barrage of interviews that the hype around the actor demanded that he was talented but felt he’d just fallen into his fame, and it wasn’t something he really even wanted:

“To go from starting a job by accident when you’re 16 and maintaining it somehow and learning how to do it on the job as well. Because of falling into a job, you always feel like you’re a fraud, that you’re going to be thrown out at any second. So yeah, the main thing I do hope is to gradually get rid of that and really be doing what you want to be doing without feeling like you’re faking it.”

– Robert Pattinson to
The Observer
in 2015


Pattinson was already attempting to break out of the mold of Twilight before the second film even premiered, playing Salvador Dali in 2009’s Little Ashes, and while he mostly played in romance films for the rest of the Twilight years, he showed that he had another gear and an interest in playing difficult characters in weird films when he starred in 2012’s excellent dystopic anti-capitalist film Cosmopolis. Directed by none other than auteur sci-fi weirdo David Cronenberg (Videodrome, The Fly, A History of Violence), Cosmopolis had Pattinson as the brilliant but socially detached and psychologically complex billionaire Eric Packer, who is driven around New York City in his limousine-slash-high-tech-office during an extremely tumultuous day. A striking, weird film that shows a world in emotional chaos swirling around Packer’s limo, Cosmopolis is deeply philosophical and affecting about the nature of a world in late-stage capitalism, and it’s anchored by an incredible performance by Pattinson, who clearly draws on his experience of being forced into fame and fortune to play a man struggling to find meaning in his success and a world that’s falling apart.


With The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 still a few months from release when Cosmopolis dropped, the “RPatz” (a nickname he hates) craze was still in full swing, and it’s not hard to imagine some of the dedicated throngs of teenagers making their way to their obsession’s new film and finding it outright baffling. Cosmopolis did very poorly at the box office, though it has been claimed by many critics then and since, but it very much set Pattinson on the path of the rest of his career, proving that he had depths to plumb as an artist that the Twilight franchise didn’t have space for. Since Breaking Dawn – Part 2, the only film Pattinson’s starred in that could really be called “mainstream” is 2022’s The Batman, with even Christopher Nolan’s Tenet being more of an experimental object beloved mostly by deep film nerds and never cracking into the consciousness of the public at large (partly due to COVID-19).


Some of Pattinson’s more art-house work, a term which could apply much of his filmography, has become beloved in film circles, including his hard-living adventuring assistant to Charlie Hunnam in The Lost City of Z (2016), his scumbag turn in Good Time (2017) and the infinitely-meme’d The Lighthouse (2019), but the greater public has largely missed much of his work, due to its indie nature, and even many hardcore film fans missed 2014’s The Rover. Pattinson’s first film after Cosmopolis and Breaking Dawn – Part, The Rover was written and directed by Australian up-and-comer David Michôd, who developed the story with Dark Matter star and fellow Aussie Joel Edgerton (another actor with a much deeper career than people might know). Michôd garnered international attention with his first two films, crime drama Animal Kingdom (writer/director, later turned into an American show) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt burnout dramedy Hesher (writer), and while Pattinson was nervous to audition for seemingly neuro-divergent miner/bandit Rey, Michôd apparently found him electric, saying to The Sydney Morning Herald:


“(Pattinson is) really smart, and not the sort of pretty boy I was expecting. As soon as it was time to start testing … he was my first choice, by a long way.”

Year

Film

David Michôd’s Contribution

2010

Animal Kingdom

Writer/director

Hesher

Writer

2014

The Rover

Writer/director/producer

2017

War Machine

Writer/director

2019

The King

Writer/director/producer

Announced

Wizards!

Writer/director


  • The Rover shows a post-collapse world, with Pattinson playing a character with difficulty communicating but a warm heart.
  • Guy Pearce co-stars in the film as a violent, grizzled man who wants his car back.
  • The movie has clear echoes of the Mad Max franchise, but it takes that genre and turns it much more brutal and realistic through director David Michôd’s vision.

3:05

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Pattinson’s The Rover character is about as far from Edward Cullen as one could get, playing Reynolds (“Rey”), a man from the American South who’s found himself in a post-“collapse” (what actually happened isn’t explained) Australia with his brother Henry (the great Scoot McNairy) to work “the mines.” The implication is that something so drastic has occurred in the world that jobs mining natural resources are among some of the only and best ways for anyone to survive, and so people from all over have come to the wastelands of the Australian outback to get these jobs. The Rover and its characters travel this outback trying to stay alive in what’s mostly a lawless zone, though roaming bands of government/army forces do pepper the desert, mostly to abduct people and send them back to Sydney, which it’s implied is still holding on to some sense of cultural and municipal stability.


Rey is actually the secondary character to Guy Pearce’s Eric, a thoroughly grizzled man of few words from whom McNairy and a pair of apparent bandits steal a car. Pearce immediately goes into Terminator mode, chasing down the men to get his car back, very clearly only barely being able to contain his rage. Eric’s journey takes him through various hovels and compounds on the side of the road, full of shotgun-wielding salvage dealers, prostitution/drug dens and barely-functioning motels that dish out stew to travelers, and if all of this sounds familiar, Eric and the setting are very much echoes of Australia’s premiere franchise, Mad Max. The comparisons are undeniable, but where the Mad Max movies go campy/sci-fi and even humorous in their fantastical style, The Rover is dead, unflinchingly serious. Pearce is barely even playing an anti-hero, he’s so angry and quick to brutal violence, and he refuses to explain himself and takes out everyone in his way, which is why when he comes across Rey and drags him along with him to help him find Rey’s brother and Eric’s car, it’s deeply effective as the pair start to find some sort of bond in all the trauma.


Rey is, for lack of a more accurate word (as the film doesn’t explain it, really), some level of neuro-divergent, definitely not lacking in intelligence but with a brain that is operating differently than those around him and with a style of communication (through rotted teeth) that people either find baffling or outright angering in this stark world. It’s a character that could easily be played in an offensive way, and a less thoughtful actor in a less thoughtfully-made film might have gone Simple Jack about it, but Pattinson’s performance makes it work beautifully, giving Rey depth and ability along with a lot of heart that really starts to get under Eric’s thick skin. As the vicious odyssey across the desert continues, Rey’s openness and quick loyalty to Eric after feeling abandoned by his brother are powerful and heart-breaking in the disaster-shocked world the pair moves through, and yet he never comes across as helpless or lacking in intelligence.


One particularly effective moment comes with Rey rapping along to modern pop-rap, something Michôd says was important to show as, in a regular world, Rey would just be another young adult with young adult interests. This balance between humanity, the stark desert and the lawless land is the language The Rover speaks, with Eric’s seeming nihilism and lack of empathy challenged by Rey and some of what the pair come across, and this idea of good and beauty living right alongside imminent death and bleak, unforgiving land is echoed in the film’s aesthetic. Shots of the hardest desert and dead bodies are contrasted with beautiful sunsets and the occasional surprisingly homey interior, and the film’s soundtrack, which largely builds on the gorgeous work of beloved indie instrumental band Tortoise and the work of experimental composers Colin Stetson and William Basinski, is essential in building the mood of the film. In the end, The Rover is all about this aesthetic, creating a real sense of a wild, damaged world that somehow still keeps going.


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  • Historically, Westerns and sci-fi go hand-in-hand.
  • The Rover exemplifies what writer J.B. Priestley said about sci-fi in the 50s, showing what humans do when the world falls apart.
  • The movie’s contrast of finding meaning versus living in a world that’s already ended is poignant and beautiful, and it should be seen by more people.


It’s in this aesthetic and in using many of the genre’s tropes, like gunslinging, revenge, survival and a hard land, that fit The Rover into the Western genre. Some purists might find it too far in the left-field of the genre, with its near-future setting and lack of any cowboy hats, horses etc., but it should be remembered that Westerns with sci-fi elements go as far back as 1935’s The Phantom Empire in film, which features rayguns, robots and just about every old sci-fi trope there is. The relationship between sci-fi and Westerns goes even further back in print, with the very first sci-fi “dime novel” being 1868’s The Steam Man of the Prairies, which featured a giant steam-powered metal man that carries a boy in a carriage through Western adventures. Any cursory look at the history of the two genres, as odd as it may be from a modern perspective, provides ample evidence that the Western and science fiction aren’t just good occasional bedfellows, their histories are inseparable.


In fact, in 1953, massively important literary figure and radio host J.B. Priestley named the Western one of the three (only three, at the time) types of sci-fi, along with sci-fi focused on the actual gadgets and science and sci-fi (like Ray Bradbury, Priestley says) that uses the tropes of the genre for bigger, more imaginative thoughts. While Priestley thoroughly dismisses Western sci-fi, because he says at the time it made up the vast majority of the genre and he found much of it vapid, he goes on in his book Thoughts in the Wilderness to say something that very much echoes what The Rover is doing:

“The price our descendants will pay for our present idiocies is terrible. After us — not the deluge but the universal nightmare. […] Science fiction and Flying Saucer legends seem to me important because they show us what is really happening in men’s minds [… allowing] us a glimpse of what is boiling down below. Of course, our political leaders, solemn experts, pundits of platform and Press, do not concern themselves with such trivialities, for they still imagine, against all the evidence, that men are as rational as they like to think they are.”


Watching Eric and Rey careen through a broken world, one where the implication is that the “political leaders” and “solemn experts” did not save it, Priestley’s words echo strongly, and one can imagine that, had he seen The Rover, he’d maybe have tempered his hate for the sci-fi Western. Only two paragraphs later in his book, Priestley talks about “good” sci-fi showing man “trying to escape himself. He cannot come to terms with either this good earth or his own soul; he is rootless, destructive, insane, so goes hurtling and screaming, a lost spirit, into endless black space.” Replace the void of the space sci-fi with the wasteland of a post-collapse Australia, and Pearce and Pattinson represent Priestley’s vision of man to a tee, exemplifying what he thought made sci-fi important and worthwhile.


And that’s what The Rover is: A beautifully hard film, showing people trying their hardest to survive and find meaning in their survival in a world that’s already ended. When Eric tries to explain to an army officer, who’s still going through the motions of bureaucracy and a semblance of pre-collapse structure, that his world is already over, he responds to the question “Are you threatening me?” with “No. A threat means there’s still something left to happen.” Eric, and the film, is Echoing that Priestley’s idea of sci-fi’s importance being in showing humanity that the world is past saving. And yet, when Eric rants to Rey about the same thing, saying that all god did for Rey was put a bullet in him and abandon him, he immediately undercuts it by saying “The only thing that means anything right now is that I’m here and (your brother)’s not. […] You don’t learn to fight, your death’s going to come real soon.”


That contrast is what lives in the characters and the very land of The Rover: It shows people who know it’s all over living in a place that was deadly to life even before society collapsed, and yet still they find reasons to care, people to care about and ways to keep going. This is what makes The Rover more than just standard post-apocalyptic or Western fare, and in fact, that struggle to keep going, to make it, to carve a place in an uncaring world, is what defines the Western even more than the saloons and six-shooters and horses. All of those things are just tools to keep surviving, just as the cars, guns and roadside shelters are for the people of The Rover, and powered by massive performances from Pattinson and Pearce and a stunningly bleak yet beautiful aesthetic from Michôd, the movie nails the feeling of living past a world’s expiration date. It’s tough, touching, weird and unique, and yet it works in familiar genres and tropes, and the result is a film that not only helped launch one of the world’s better oddball actors into the next phase of his career, it’s also simply one of the better films of its respective genres of the last ten years. Available to rent at every major site, The Rover is a prescient quiet masterpiece, and it should be talked about more.


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