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The Road 's commitment to Cormac McCarthy's dark vision may prove too unyielding for some, but the film benefits from hauntingly powerful performances from Viggo Mortensen and Kodi McPhee.

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Note: I first saw "The Road" in September at the Toronto Film Festival, as one of eight films I saw in three days. I wrote a draft of a review at the time and sent it. That review accidentally found its way into sight in October, long before the film was scheduled to open. I yanked it offline as quickly as I could.

I saw the movie a second time at a press screening on Oct. 27 in Chicago. I see festival films again whenever I have the chance. I find the second viewing makes the good ones better, and the bad ones worse. Such is the case with "The Road."

"The Road" evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy 's novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling. I'm not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers. The novel itself would not be successful if it were limited to its characters and images. Its effect comes above all through McCarthy's prose. It is the same with all of McCarthy's work, but especially this one, because his dialogue is so restrained, less baroque than usual.

The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared. This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world. No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country.

The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food. We've always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals.

Although we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down. The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets. He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey.

I am not sure the characters could be played better, or differently. Viggo Mortensen portrays The Man as dogged and stubborn, determined to protect his boy. Kodi Smit-McPhee is convincing as a child stunned by destruction, depending on his father in a world where it must be clear to him that any man can die in an instant. The movie resists any tendency toward making the child cute, or the two of them heartwarming.

Flashback scenes star Charlize Theron as the wife and mother of the two in earlier, sunnier days. These sequences show the marriage as failing, and these memories haunt The Man. I'm not sure what relevance this subplot has to the film as a whole; a marriage happy or sad -- isn't it much the same in this new world? It has a lot of relevance, however, to The Man and The Boy. In times of utter devastation, memories are what we cling to.

The external events of the novel have been boldly solved, and this is an awesome production. But McCarthy's prose has the uncanny ability to convey more than dialogue and incident. It's as dense as poetry. It is more spare in The Road than in a more ornate work like Suttree ; in The Road, it is as evocative in the way Samuel Beckett is. If it were not, "The Road" might be just another film of sci-fi apocalypse. It's all too easy to imagine how this material could be vulgarized, as Richard Matheson's novel was in the 2007 version of " I Am Legend ."

How could the director and writer, John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall , have summoned the strength of McCarthy's writing? Could they have used more stylized visuals, instead of relentless realism? A grainy black-and-white look to suggest severely limited resources? I have no idea. Perhaps McCarthy, like Faulkner, is all but unfilmable.

The one great film of his work is the Coens' " No Country for Old Men ," but it began with an extraordinary character and surrounded him with others. The Road is not fertile soil, providing a world with life draining from it. McCarthy's greatest novels are Suttree and Blood Meridian. The second, set in the Old West, is about a fearsome, bald, skeletal man named Judge Holden, who is implacable in his desire to inflict suffering and death. ("Blood Meridian" is being prepared by Todd Field , director of " In the Bedroom .")

Hillcoat's earlier film, " The Proposition " (2005), written by Nick Cave , seems almost McCarthy-like. Something in McCarthy's work draws Hillcoat to it, and you must be a brave director to let that happen. Writing this, I realize few audience members can be expected to have read The Road, even though it was a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Fewer still will have read McCarthy's other works.

I've been saying for years that a film critic must review the film before him, and not how "faithful" the film is to the book -- as if we're married to the book, and somehow screen adaptation is adultery. I realize my own fault is in being so very familiar with Cormac McCarthy. That may affect my ability to view any film adaptation of his work afresh. When I know a novel is bring filmed, I make it a point to not read the book. Yet I am grateful for having read McCarthy's.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Road (2009)

111 minutes

Viggo Mortensen as The Man

Kodi Smit-McPhee as The Boy

Charlize Theron as Wife

Robert Duvall as Old Man

Guy Pearce as The Veteran

Directed by

• John Hillcoat
• Joe Penhall

Based on the novel by

• Cormac McCarthy

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The Road review – respectful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale

As a father and son journey across a desolate America, this loses some of its power by swerving the novel's more shocking aspects

C ormac McCarthy’s almost unbearably disturbing 2006 novel about the post-apocalyptic journey of a father and son across a desolate America has now been adapted for the screen and, for this eminently respectful version, director John Hillcoat has effected a guarded change of emphasis. Like an orchestra conductor dampening down the ominous blasts of timpani and brass, while urging more from his emotion-twisting string section, Hillcoat has intensified the heartrending poignancy, while deflecting our attention from the horror.

Readers of McCarthy’s book know that it is the depictions of cannibalism in this lawless future-world which provide its deepest shocks. The man and his boy chance upon a secluded country home containing a locked basement horrifically packed with naked prisoners being “farmed” as food for their captors. Later, we find the remains of an infant’s corpse, apparently once ready to be eaten by its desperate parents.

The second of these events is tactfully omitted from the film, and the first, I felt, had its impact marginally reduced. Hillcoat uses voiceover, which has a calming, distancing function, no matter what revulsions are being described. This is undoubtedly a serious, powerful, well-acted movie, but I can’t fully share the critical enthusiasm it has widely gained elsewhere because of what seemed to me its fractional reluctance to confront the nightmare fully, though what Joe Penhall’s adaptation arguably does is import into the body of the movie a premonition of the unexpectedly redemptive and gentle tone in McCarthy’s final pages.

Viggo Mortensen plays the nameless “Man” struggling across this blasted, hellish landscape with his son. The America they knew has been destroyed by an unexplained environmental catastrophe. The mother of his child (Charlize Theron) has deserted them, although the question of blame has been rendered all but meaningless by this overwhelming calamity, smashing the concepts of moral behaviour. The boy, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, is about 10 years old; his father could almost be any age from 45 to 60. He is bearded, dirty, careworn, and his features and body made gaunt and hard with hunger, sleeplessness and fear.

They stumble into the wrecked, deserted supermarkets that are a staple of this kind of story, and even trudge through piles of banknotes: now just useless trash, of course. (Hillcoat actually makes them $100 bills, which I think is overegging it a little.) The two of them are cold all of the time, though the father is capable of almost superhuman efforts to conquer their hardship: at one point he swims into an icy sea in an attempt to scavenge supplies from a wrecked ship.

They are on continuous alert against the marauding gangs of predators who want to kill, imprison or eat them. The father and son can trust no one and Mortensen has relentlessly drilled into the boy the need to guard against the “bad guys”, although this has triggered in his son a converse fear that they are becoming the bad guys themselves. He is becoming what passes for a moral conscience in this shattered world, and is perhaps evolving into a sacrificial infant-god. Yet they do have encounters with people who are not obvious enemies: a near-blind old man, played by Robert Duvall, and an unhappy thief, played by Michael K Williams (The Wire’s Omar Little).

The two push their tattered possessions and what scraps of food they have in a shopping trolley, emphasising a weird, subliminal resemblance to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. By far their most precious possession is their gun, which has just two bullets left. When the time comes, the father knows he must steel himself to kill his boy and then himself. If they have to fire the gun in self-defence, it seriously limits their ultimate double-exit strategy.

Apocalyptic movies come into three categories: “This isn’t really going to happen”, “What if this really happened?” and “This is really going to happen”. Roland Emmerich’s 2012 comes into the first group, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men into the second, and Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf the third. The Road straddles the last two categories, although even Haneke had nothing to compare with the chilling horror of that gun-dilemma in The Road.

On the screen, just as on the page, it grips and horrifies because it is so stunningly real. If the end came, and we had to struggle on into a nightmarish world, fearing the living and envying the dead, then suicide would be the only thing on anyone’s mind, an option assessed and deferred hour by hour, moment by moment.

It doesn’t bear thinking about, and to do Hillcoat’s film justice, it does think about it, although the greater emphasis is elsewhere – on the heartrending loneliness of father and son, an unholy trinity of loneliness. The father can’t confide in his son; the boy cannot explain his terrors to his father, and the pair of them are utterly alone in this abysmal cosmic wasteland. It is an inexpressibly painful subject and Hillcoat has brought it to the screen with great intelligence.

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The road — film review.

In "The Road," director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale.

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Venice Film Festival — Competition

VENICE — In “The Road,” director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America.

Shot through with a bleak intensity and pessimism that offers little hope for a better tomorrow, the film is more suitable to critical appreciation than to attracting huge audiences though topliners Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron will attract initial business.

The screenplay by Joe Penhall takes a very different tack from end-of-the-worlders like “Children of Men,” choosing rigorous, low-key realism over special effects. The story is told largely through flashbacks, which are the memories of a father (Mortensen) struggling for survival on the road with his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

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Ten years have passed since a series of terrible earthquakes and fires have destroyed the world. These spectacular catastrophes are barely glimpsed onscreen, however. The film unfolds as an anguishing forced march in which the father tries to protect the boy and lead them south, to a warmer climate where life may still be possible.

No animals and few men are left in this dying, gray world where no vegetation grows and food stocks have been used up long ago. Bundled in filthy coats, father and son trudge south with a shopping cart containing their few belongings. Hiding from bands of roving cannibals and forever on the brink of suicide, the only human thing that sustains them is the love they share.

Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe create a frighteningly barren world virtually devoid of color, where everything is covered with fine gray ash and even the sea has become gray. Occasional flashbacks to pre-disaster life offer momentary visual respites of color, music and warmth.

Theron, who is pregnant when the cataclysm occurs, appears here as an enigmatic figure both weak and strong, a realist who would prefer that the family save themselves from starvation by committing suicide, as many others have done. But there are only two bullets left in the gun. Her solitary leave-taking, waking out into the night, is a wrenching image.

In this kind of world, horror elements are there for the taking, but are kept in the background apart from one nightmarish scene in which father and son discover a lonely house in the woods. In the locked cellar are a dozen writhing, naked men and women with missing limbs — stock for a band of well-fed cannibals. The duo also makes a narrow escape from a roving gang of rifle-toting desperadoes aboard a huge truck, who appear out of nowhere Mad Max style.

Most of the film, however, describes the bond between the still-innocent boy and his weathered, dying father. The boy, several times imagined by his father to be an angel or a god, struggles to find values the adult is unable to give him.

“We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys” is the maximum moral guidance Mortensen has to offer. They do shelter in a ruined church and meet a wizened old-timer named Ely (Robert Duvall) who issues prophetic warnings, but the absence of God, and therefore hope, is a given throughout the film.

Production: 2929 Prods., Chockstone Pictures, Dimension Films Sales: Film Nation Entertainment Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker, Garret Dillahunt Director: John Hillcoat Screenwriter: Joe Penhall Producers: Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, Steve Schwartz Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban, Marc Butan, Rudd Simmons Co-producers: Mike Upton, Erik Hodge Director of photography: Javier Aguirresarobe Production designer: Chris Kennedy Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis Costumes: Margot Wilson Editor: Joe Gregory

No rating, 112 minutes

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The road ending explained: what happens to the boy.

The Road is a bleak, post-apocalyptic drama adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name. Here’s the movie’s tragic ending explained.

The Road movie is a bleak, post-apocalyptic drama with an ending that packs quite the gut punch — here’s the end of The Road movie explained. Director John Hillcoat made Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road into a movie in 2009, and it’s a largely faithful page-to-screen adaptation. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee star as a father and son (credited only as “Man” and “Boy") trying to survive after an unspecified extinction event has wiped out most of the population. Action movie star Charlize Theron appears in a series of flashbacks as the man’s wife, who chose suicide over living in the savage new world they inhabit, while Robert Duvall and Michael Kenneth Williams have small roles as fellow survivors. The Road follows the man and the boy as they head southwards through the barren wasteland in search of the coast and warmer climes, scavenging what little food they can find and having terrifying encounters with marauders and cannibals along the way.

The man tries to protect his son as best he can but realizes how desperate their situation is and so keeps a gun loaded with their last bullet and ensures the boy knows how to take his own life, since death isn't the worst fate for the boy in the post-apocalyptic 2019 shown in The Road . This is as difficult to watch as it sounds, and there’s no let-up during The Road’s ending either. At the climax of The Road movie, the pair finally arrive at the coast only to find it just as barren as the mainland. As they make their way through a derelict coastal town, the man is shot in the leg with an arrow by a paranoid fellow survivor. In The Road , the man kills his assailant with a flare gun he’s scavenged but slowly succumbs to his wound and a worrying cough he’s been plagued with throughout the movie as his son watches him die. That's not all that happens though, so here's the full ending of The Road explained.

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The Road Has A Deliberately Bitter-Sweet Ending

The final scenes of The Road’s ending offer a glimmer of hope — at least according to some. A couple of days after the boy’s father dies he’s approached by a man ( played by Prometheus' Guy Pearce and credited as “Veteran”) who is travelling with what appears to be his wife (Molly Parker), their two young kids, and their pet dog. They tell the boy they’ve been following him and his father for some time and ask if he’d like to accompany them, offering a light at the end of the grim tunnel that is the experience of The Road .

However, some have a much darker interpretation of this potentially hopeful ending for The Road movie. It’s posited that Guy Pearce’s character and his companions are actually cannibals rather than the saviors they seem to be and have been following the boy until his father died in hopes of securing their next meal. That said, The Road’s ending is fairly ambiguous so whether its younger protagonist meets a bleak end or goes on to survive another day of the Mad Max -type apocalypse in the care of a new family is up to the viewer to decide.

The Road Movie Is Bleak But Has Nothing On The Book

While The Road movie adaptation is certainly bleak, the book is actually much worse. For example, there's a passage in which the two main characters pass a group of cannibals who are roasting a human baby on a spit. It's necessary for studios to make plenty of changes when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations, and The Road wasn't exempt. That being said, The Road is considered a somewhat faithful adaptation. Most changes weren't made to change the plot, but in order to make the ending of the movie more palpable for audiences. A notable example of this elsewhere is the infamous sewer orgy from Stephen King's IT novel being cut from every on-screen adaptation. An example from The Road includes the death of the Father. This moment was borderline unwatchable in the movie, but it's even sadder in the book's ending. While both the movie and the book see the Boy staying with the Father three days after his death, in the book the Father actually dies in the woods after attempting to set up a campsite, never getting to see the coast. The horrors of the Marauders are also downplayed in the movie. For example, in the books, some had catamites (sexual slaves of a pubescent age used for degradation and harassment). All in all, these changes were necessary, as some elements of The Road as a book were just too unappetizing to appear on the big screen.

Next: The Midnight Sky Ending Explained

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> The Road (2009) Film Review

Reviewed by: Anton Bitel

About a third of the way through Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road, the two main characters cautiously watch a passing caravan, with colourfully decorated warriors in the front, then harnessed slaves pulling carts piled with the material spoils of war, then the women, and lastly a 'supplementary consort' of yoked catamites.

This is one of only a very few episodes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that has not found its way into Joe Penhall's otherwise faithful screen adaptation, and the reason is obvious. On the page, this wagon train is positively terrifying, but on screen it would bring McCarthy's post-apocalyptic vision a little too close to the well-charted (and now cheesy) territories of Mad Max . John Hillcoat's The Road, you see, is pure, stripped-down bleakness, both in the desaturated drabness of its appearance and in the last-days essentialism of its themes. This is an America that has become no country for men or women of any age, and certainly no place for the leather-bound heroics of a Road Warrior.

After an undefined event (nuclear assault? cosmic collision? environmental catastrophe? it hardly matters any more), the sky has turned ash-grey, animals and plants have died, the cities have burned down, and in a desperate scramble for ever dwindling supplies of food and fuel, human survivors have turned on themselves.

Through this desolate landscape, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) flee the increasing cold of the north and their memories of the boy's now dead mother (Charlize Theron) for whatever might await them at the coast. Pushing their few belongings in a shopping cart, sleeping rough, scavenging for anything edible, and trying to avoid danger (be it earthquakes or other travelers), the duo seeks the end of the road while bearing grim witness to the end of days – and yet, in their struggles and suffering, in their dreams of the past and fears for the future, in their harrowing decisions and occasional acts of kindness, and in their abiding love for one another whatever happens, they also come to define, recognise and maintain their own fragile humanity, 'carrying the fire' where there is otherwise nothing but darkness all about.

Cinema often pairs fathers and sons in extremis to test (or at least dramatise) notions of identity and heritage – just think Lone Wolf and Cub in the Babycart series, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy, Michael Sullivan and Michael Sullivan Jr in Road To Perdition or Romulus and Raimond (also played by Smit McPhee) in Romulus, My Father . In The Road, however, the father and son do not even get the specificity of names. They are cyphers for all our hopes and anxieties, traveling the long genetic/historic road to nowhere.

A key moment comes when Man and Boy are shown sitting side by side on the sand, staring out to sea, and the boy asks: "What's on the other side?" In the world Hillcoat has realised with such beautiful, awful spareness, everything (including the boy's question) comes to resonate with a metaphysical, even theological quality. The boy seems to be reflecting upon not only the unseen lands across the Atlantic, but also a different kind of beyond where he hopes one day to be reunited with his mother. Of course, as the two sit on the beach contemplating the unknown eternity before them, they are also staring out at us in the cinema, leaving us to ponder how similar a road we all travel, measured in love and loss, hope and despair, faith and suspicion, civilisation and bestiality - and ending, for each and every one of us, in exactly the same place.

Director: John Hillcoat

Writer: Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy

Starring: Charlize Theron, Viggo Mortensen, Garret Dillahunt, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Molly Parker, Michael K. Williams, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Brenna Roth, Bob Jennings, Jeremy Ambler, David August Lindauer, Jack Erdie, Nick Pasqual, Jared Pfennigwerth

Runtime: 119 minutes

Country: US

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2009 Directed by John Hillcoat

In a moment the world changed forever.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind and water. It is cold enough to crack stones, and, when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the warmer south, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there.

Viggo Mortensen Kodi Smit-McPhee Charlize Theron Robert Duvall Guy Pearce Molly Parker Michael Kenneth Williams Garret Dillahunt Bob Jennings Buddy Sosthand Agnes Herrmann Kirk Brown Jack Erdie David August Lindauer Gina Preciado Wilson Moore Mark Tierno

Director Director

John Hillcoat

Producers Producers

Nick Wechsler Paula Mae Schwartz Steve Schwartz

Writer Writer

Joe Penhall

Original Writer Original Writer

Cormac McCarthy

Casting Casting

Francine Maisler Lori Lewis Katie Shenot Lauren Grey

Editor Editor

Jon Gregory

Cinematography Cinematography

Javier Aguirresarobe

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Lighting lighting.

James Plannette

Camera Operators Camera Operators

Eric Alan Edwards Dan Kneece Matías Mesa

Production Design Production Design

Chris Kennedy

Art Direction Art Direction

Gershon Ginsburg

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Robert Greenfield Victoria Ruskin David Lee Toth Erin Fite Joe Rynearson Jason A. Pollock Patcharee Blanchard Jon Graubarth Whitney Guerra Jr. Ella Jackson Adam Johnson Jennifer Lagura Philip Blackburn

Special Effects Special Effects

David Fletcher

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Christina Graff Paul Graff Glenn Allen Richard Friedlander Andrea D'Amico Noel Hooper Christa Tazzeo Phillip Moses

Stunts Stunts

Composers composers.

Nick Cave Warren Ellis

Sound Sound

Edward Tise Goro Koyama Andy Malcolm Leslie Shatz Chris David A. Josh Reinhardt Robert Jackson Todd Beckett David Esparza Brian Dunlop

Costume Design Costume Design

Margot Wilson

Makeup Makeup

Toni G Sherri Simmons

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Geordie Sheffer Enzo Angileri Jennifer Santiago

Dimension Films 2929 Productions Nick Wechsler Productions Chockstone Pictures

Releases by Date

03 sep 2009, 13 sep 2009, 08 oct 2009, 19 oct 2009, 31 oct 2009, 25 nov 2009, theatrical limited, 27 nov 2009, 02 dec 2009, 10 dec 2009, 25 dec 2009, 07 jan 2010, 08 jan 2010, 22 jan 2010, 27 jan 2010, 28 jan 2010, 05 feb 2010, 11 feb 2010, 19 feb 2010, 26 feb 2010, 11 mar 2010, 23 apr 2010, 29 apr 2010, 30 apr 2010, 06 may 2010, 20 may 2010, 28 may 2010, 24 jun 2010, 26 jun 2010, 06 oct 2010, 17 sep 2010, 03 sep 2018, 01 apr 2021, 29 jun 2021, 04 may 2010, 17 may 2010, releases by country.

• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical MA15+
• Premiere Toronto International Film Festival
• Theatrical limited 14A
• Theatrical 12
• Theatrical 15
• Premiere Night Visions Film Festival
• Physical 12 DVD & Blu-Ray
• Digital VOD
• Digital 6play
• Digital Prime Video
• Premiere Venice Film Festival
• Theatrical VM14
• Theatrical G
• Theatrical B15
• Digital od 12 lat Lektor
• Theatrical M/16

Russian Federation

• Theatrical 18+

South Africa

South korea.

• Premiere Stockholm International Film Festival

Switzerland

• Theatrical 14
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Popular reviews

Review by Jakub Flasz ★★★★★ 21

Every single idiot hoping for a zombie apocalypse 'because it will be so cool' should be assigned to have a sit-down with "The road". Brutal, gritty, dull and depressingly sad, this film is probably the closest to what would actually happen in the event of shit hitting the proverbial fan. (Edit: though it has nothing to do with zombies, but a planet dying in a mysterious but straightforward fashion). It's never an easy watch and it does kick you in the stomach more than once, but it is simply a masterpiece.

Review by DirkH ★★★½ 12

I don't really like luxury. It makes me uncomfortable. As it happens me and my family were invited to go on a holiday for a week by my in-laws to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. Our destination? A five star resort in Turkey. So to counterbalance all that luxury I decided finally reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road would keep me suitably grounded, so I took it along with me. The holiday was great, the book was phenomenal.

McCarthy's novel is an astonishing accomplishment of minimalistic proze that strives to move, inspire and lay bare the human spirit and the bond of blood. It does so by incessantly terrorizing its readers with oppressively bleak vistas, horrific encounters and an avalanche of…

Review by Plainview Bitch ★★★★ 11

Full of hope and optimism. This is hands down one of the most uplifting films out there.

Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★ 23

If you are in a depressive state, or have mental issues, then this is the last movie you should see, because boy, this movie will rob you of all hope.

So yeah, after hearing so much about the movie, I finally decided to watch it and, as I mentioned above, this is probably one of the best depictions of the Apocalypse in any medium. The gray cinematography further emphasizes the sense of dread and despair that the world out leads inhabit has to endure. Several movies have used color corrections to create this feeling, but this one is one of the few that actually succeeded. I believe the long pauses and little dialogue also contribute to this vibe.

Review by Harry Ridgway ★★★★★ 14

(As of this moment, I have not read the highly acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel, but I have every intention to do so in the near future).

A complex, muggy and devastating tale, The Road triumphs as a gritty and smart apocalyptic adventure which delves deep into harrowing territory and never relents. Substantially exploring its strong moral core and distressing atmosphere, The Road is quite possibly the most realistic and blunt film about the hypothetical destruction of civilization that I have seen. It takes a popular and overused idea and transforms it into an original and investing journey which resonates more than might be expected. The film transcends the conventional sci-fi, 'end-of-the-world' spectacle and materializes into an intelligent and emotional film…

Review by a ☭ ★★★★★ 3

WOO-WEE, I LOVE THINKING ABOUT THE INEVITABLE DEATH OF MY FATHER WHO I HAVE AN INEXPLICABLY CLOSE BOND WITH I FUCKING LOVE IT I AM DEFINITELY SCREAMING

Review by Saberspark 2

Well that was depressing

Review by Ethan Ethan ★★★½

Black, bleak, cheerless, chill, Cimmerian, cloudy, cold, comfortless, dark, darkening, depressive, desolate, dire, disconsolate, dismal, drear, dreary, dreich [chiefly Scottish], elegiac (also elegiacal), forlorn, funereal, gloomy, glum, godforsaken, gray (also grey), lonely, lonesome, lugubrious, miserable, morbid, morose, murky, plutonian, saturnine, sepulchral, solemn, somber (or sombre), sullen, sunless, tenebrific, tenebrous, wretched. Don't have anything else to say about this movie so I looked up depressing on thesaurus. Bleak is my favorite tho.

Review by Travis Lytle ★★★★★ 21

Whisper-quiet and bathed in the sooty cinematography of its wrecked landscapes, "The Road" is a meditation on both survival and giving up the fight. With that tension as its thematic catalyst, the film moves slowly and poetically through the harrowing and heartbreaking journey of its protagonists. An ideally-cast Viggo Mortensen anchors the film, but it is Kodi Smit-McPhee who provides the film its conscience. "The Road" is an unexpectedly excellent and moving film.

Review by Marianna Neal ★★★ 7

Well... they did a great job capturing the bleak landscape described in the book! But to be honest, this film just didn't do it for me, which is a shame because Viggo Mortensen's performance as the father couldn't have been more perfect. It's an impossible task to capture heart-wrenching magic of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

Review by Ben Hibburd ☘🏀 ★★★★★ 19

Cormac McCarthy...

Man, few people have impacted my life as much as Cormac McCarthy. I've always found the whole para-social nature people have with celebrities and artists to be odd. I get being a fan but Stan culture is so fucking weird and has only gotten worse in the age of social media. However, as I saw the news that Cormac McCarthy, an 89 year old guy, has past away I'm ironically left feeling rather deflated. I never knew him personally, nor had I any kind of interaction with him, so why do I feel like this?

Growing up I struggled with reading (and writing) as I've mentioned before (in previous reviews). I have dyslexia and I especially struggled during…

Review by barbora ★★★ 3

honestly i would rather starve than eat pears

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Review: a journey down 'the road'.

• A story of a father and son, journeying through a post apocalyptic world in 'The Road'
• Big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's revered 2006 novel
• Visually one of the most convincing visions of a bombed-out wasteland future ever seen
• Reviewer felt delays release work against the film due to the current mood of the nation

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Here's a tip: If you see one austerely hopeless movie this year about a father and son wandering through a junk-strewn postapocalyptic wilderness as they struggle to fight off demons of fear, madness, and starvation, not to mention roving bands of cannibalistic killers, then by all means make that movie "The Road."

In this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's revered 2006 novel, Viggo Mortensen, caked in grime, plays the father with a fierce physicality and tremulous woundedness.

The film has one other thing going for it: Visually, it's one of the most spookily convincing, least ''movieish'' visions of a bombed-out wasteland future I've ever seen. (It's never stated that there was a nuclear war, a meteor, or whatever, but there's an ashy deadness to everything on screen.) The wreckage and twisted clutter, some of it spectacular, doesn't seem as if it was planted there by a set designer; it's an organic part of the landscape. This debris has integrity, almost the way the ruined city in "Full Metal Jacket" did.

Yet "The Road," for all its vivid desolation, remains a curiously unmoving experience or maybe not so curious, given that nothing really happens in it. In the novel, McCarthy played off postapocalyptic Hollywood thrillers, and so he gave you the heady feeling that you were seeing a movie unfold on the page. Yet he brought off that feat without much action; the backdrop was grand, the emotions interior and refined. That's a problem when "The Road" is done as a movie: It's like a zombie thriller drowning in tastefully severe art-house gloom.

The darkest note in the story it's what no conventional sci-fi blockbuster would dare to include is the Mortensen character's despairing realization that he must be prepared at any moment to fire a bullet into his beloved son should they be captured, since the bandits who roam the land would rape and kill the boy if he didn't. That's a haunting thing to live with, and saucer-eyed Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the son with touching half-aware innocence. But that's not enough to save the movie from its creeping inertness.

"The Road" was originally set to come out last year, and in one sense the decision to delay its release was karmically right, since (like " 2012 ") it addresses the current mood of nerve-jangling anxiety and doom. Yet the timing also works against the film.

There's enough foreboding in America right now to make sitting through a movie such as "The Road" seem like one more heavy burden that, frankly, no one needs.

EW Grade : B-

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from the book review archives

Review: ‘The Road,’ by Cormac McCarthy

In 2006, our reviewer correctly predicted that this father-son tale would eclipse the popularity of McCarthy’s 1992 hit, “All the Pretty Horses.”

Credit... Jan Robert Dünnweller

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By William Kennedy

• Oct. 21, 2021

THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy | Review first published Oct. 8, 2006

Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. … The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.”

A man in his late 40s and his son, about 10, both unnamed, are walking a desolated road. Perhaps it is the fall, but the soot has blocked out the sun, probably everywhere on the globe, and it is snowing, very cold, and getting colder. The man and boy cannot survive another winter and are heading to the Gulf Coast for warmth, on the road to a mountain pass — unnamed, but probably Lookout Mountain on the Tennessee-Georgia border. It is through the voice of the father that McCarthy delivers his vision of end times. The son, born after the sky opened, has no memory of the world that was. His father gave him lessons about it but then stopped: “He could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.” The boy’s mother committed suicide rather than face starvation, rape and the cannibalizing of herself and the family, and she mocks her husband for going forward. But he is a man with a mission. When he shoots a thug who tries to murder the boy (their first spoken contact with another human in a year) he tells his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.”

McCarthy does not say how or when God entered this man’s being and his son’s, nor does he say how or why they were chosen to survive together for 10 years, to be among the last living creatures on the road. But the tale is as biblical as it is ultimate, and the man implies that the end has happened through godly fanaticism. The world is in a nuclear winter, though that phrase is never used. The lone allusion to our long-prophesied holy war with its attendant nukes is when the man thinks: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

They keep walking, the man coughing blood, dying, envying the dead. They are starving, stalked by the unseen, by armed thugs who travel by truck, and in terror they see an army of “marchers” who appear on the road four abreast and epitomize what the apocalypse has wrought: “All wearing red scarves at their necks. … Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. … Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like windup toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. … The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of truck springs. … Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites ill clothed against the cold and fitted in dog collars and yoked each to each.”

And the boy asks, “Were they the bad guys?”

“Yes, they were the bad guys.”

“There’s a lot of them, those bad guys.”

“Yes there are. But they’re gone.”

The overarching theme in McCarthy’s work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter. Had this novel continued his pattern, that band of marching thugs would have been the focus — as it was with the apocalyptic horsemen of death in his second novel, “Outer Dark,” or the blood-mad scalp-hunters in his masterpiece, “Blood Meridian,” or the psychopathic killer in his recent novel, “No Country for Old Men.” But evil victorious is not this book’s theme. McCarthy changes the odds to favor the man and boy.

“The Road” is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses — short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him.

The accessibility of this book, the love between father and son expressed in their quicksilver conversations, and the pathos of their story will make the novel popular, perhaps beyond “All the Pretty Horses,” which had a love story and characters you might befriend and not run from, and which delivered McCarthy out of cult status and onto the best-seller list. “The Road” is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization — “the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.”

The man and boy keep heading south and do reach the ocean, which the boy heard was blue, but it is as gray with ash as the rest of the world — a dead sea. And the Gulf Coast is as cold as Tennessee. When they capture a man who stole their goods the father leaves him naked on the road to freeze. The boy protests but the father chides him: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” And then the 10-year-old messiah, who is compassion incarnate, and carrying the fire, gives up his secret. He says to his father: “Yes I am. I am the one.”

The good guys remain elusive as the father sickens, and he talks of the boy inevitably being alone on the road. The boy asks about another boy he saw walking alone. Was he lost?

“No,” the father says. “I don’t think he was lost. …”

“But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?”

“Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”

Goodness is an anomalous subject for McCarthy, especially in the language of a children’s book. He has given his own kinetic language to the narrating minds of morons, cretins, madmen, psychotic murderers; but this father and son remain only filial familiars, brave and loving and good but tongue-tied on what else they are or are becoming. But the father was right about goodness: it arrives on cue as a deus ex machina that has been following the pair and swiftly enfolds the boy savior into a holy family, maybe a holy commune, where they talk of the breath of God passing “from man to man through all of time.” Then McCarthy ends with an eloquent lament: a vision of a time gone when the world was becoming; and what had been was “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” And all things “were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Brief and mystical, this is an extremely austere conclusion to the apocalyptic pilgrimage. Of the boy’s becoming, or his mission — redeeming a dead world, outliving death? — nothing is said. The rhythmic poetry of McCarthy’s formidable talent has made us see the blasted world as clearly as Conrad wanted us to see. But the scarcity of thought in the novel’s mystical infrastructure leaves the boy a designated but unsubstantiated messiah. It makes us wish that that old humming mystery had a lyric.

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