Film review - The Road

After watching Threads I decided that I needed to watch something a bit more light hearted, so I picked The Road :-) So it is a bit more upbeat than Threads, but not by much. It tells the story of a man and his son doing whatever they need to survive in a dying world. Their dream is to reach the coast, although it's not clear what they hope to achieve beyond that besides survival.

It's a bleak film in every respect, they have to scratch through the ruins of the world to find enough food to eat. They have to fear everyone they meet in case they view them as sport, or even worse as food. For the most part the people they meet are incidental, it is the boy and the father who are the centre of attention.

They both play their parts well, the father is hard making the difficult choices where needed and trying to teach his son what he needs to know to survive. The boy is more innocent, are rather he is more hopeful, he wants to see the occasional glimpses of colour in a grey world. They balance each other well and he provides some balance to a grim film.

And it is a grim film (the book even more so, but also worth checking out), but it is very well put together and acted. This is an excellent watch and highly recommended.

Director John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In the burnt-out wasteland of a post-apocalyptic America, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to survive by any means possible as they follow a desolate, corpse-strewn road towards the coast, where they hope to find some kind of a future for themselves. Travelling with only the clothes they are wearing, a small cart of scavenged food and a pistol with two bullets as protection, they struggle to survive in the ravaged landscape, encountering a few other desperate survivors along the way.

The Road is available from Amazon (and is an excellent film)