For Into The Wild, and the film’s protagonist Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), the trip was never about anything other than the trip, destinations be damned. Into The Wild doesn’t follow the normal road trip format, usually including one or more characters in a car on the way to wherever, only to discover that the trip itself was more important than the destination.
ON THE ROADMOVIE PLUS
Plus a whole lot of zombies ( and maybe more to come). The film presents the road trip as a transformative event, with a satisfying emotional payoff. When we first meet the protagonists of Zombieland, they identify themselves by birthplace exclusively (“ Hi, I’m Columbus”) as a way to resist forming bonds, but by the end of the film romances spark and surprising friendships form. These characters aren’t traversing the country on some field trip, they are desperately (and hilariously) seeking asylum - and twinkies.Īs with any good road trip, barriers are broken down in the film, and relationships are formed. Starring Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eiesenberg, and Abigail Breslin, the film takes place in a world ravaged by the zombie apocalypse. When Zombielandarrived in theaters in 2009, we saw a polar extreme of road trip insanity. Some serve practical purposes, like recovering an accidental sex-tape or heading to vacation. Some film road trips are quests of self-discovery.
These are the 17 Greatest Road Trip Movies of All Time. This list is about the best of that category. Despite having tonal differences and unique genre elements, road trip movies constitute a category all themselves. Others are farcical comedies of error, presenting hilarious roadblocks and setbacks that exist only in fiction. Some are heroes’ journeys, transformative experiences that elevate characters or bring them to age. In cinema, though, road trips are important in ways that seldom match reality. Exciting, sure but eventually those trips drone, and drone, and drone and… are we there yet? Even when driving to a vacation, the travel usually ends up being the worst part. Road trips, despite our romantic cultural idea of them, are usually unremarkable chores – moving (the worst), driving home for the holidays, heading to school, etc.
The basest definition of a road trip is simply this: a person or people moving across a great distance, usually in an automobile.