The Road (2009)

The end of the world is upon us and well, there ain't a whole lot we can do about it. This sentence just about sums up the plot of John Hillcoat's adaptation of the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, author of the book that led to the brilliant Coen Brothers film No Country For Old Men. In The Road, civilization as we know it has been wiped out. The majority of the population has died, animals no longer exist and food is sparse. The reason for this remains unknown throughout the whole film but in this situation a reason isn't necessary. This sparsity has led some to cannibalism but not the Man (Viggo Mortensen) or the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), these are the 'good guys' as the Boy often refers to them as.

The landscape is beautifully captured by Hillcoat and his team. CGI aided I am sure but nevertheless Hillcoat's palette of predominantly grey and murky colours matches the bleak outlook of the film perfectly. Visually, it's a very impressive film to look at.

The film also stars Charlize Theron in a role that is almost superfluous. She plays the Wife of the Man and mother of the Boy. She only appears in flashbacks, from a time when civilization was slightly less bleak but clearly the destruction of the world has already kicked in. We see the Wife give birth to the Boy but soon after, failing to see any hope in the future, walks out of the house leaving behind her family, and disappears, quite literally, into the shadows to die.

What The Road is, and where it stands above many post-apocalyptic stories, such as I Am Legend, is that it doesn't bastardize the situation with daft flesh-eating zombies or fantastical mythological nonsense. What we have here is exactly what I'd imagine 'the end of the world' to be like. Simply a hopeless world in which it is a struggle to survive,not because of the dangers of being mauled to death but by the sheer forces of nature and evaporation of the human world as we can to accept it.

But would I ever want to see this film again. Probably not. As I am sure I've made clear, it's a bleak film with no outlook on the future. It's not what you'd call easy viewing and isn't a film that you'd get much out of a second time round. It's lacking in as much emotive punch as it probably should have, and the emotion it does try to draw out of the viewer, especially in scenes at the very end of the film, is a little manipulative and an attempt to force the hand. But by no means is The Road a bad film and hey...it's better than Avatar.


Rating: 7/10