The Road

Civilisation has been destroyed, the human race reduced to a few survivors struggling to eke out a living amidst the ruins of what once was. A man and his son make their way south to the coast, hoping to find warmer weather and more plentiful supplies of food, before the world dies.


Based on the Pulitzer-winning 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a post-apocalyptic movie starring Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smith-McPhee as his son. A number of other established actors have extended cameos, with Charlize Theron playing Mortensen's wife in flashback, Robert Duvall as an old man met on the road and The Wire's Michael K. Williams as a thief, whilst Guy Pearce also appears briefly. However, the film focuses on Mortensen and Smith-McPhee almost exclusively for long stretches of its running time.

The book is notable for its pared-back, stark prose style, which is unflinching in its depiction of the brutalised, battered world and the often savage people that are encountered along the way. The film is similarly cold and stripped-back, with a heavily desaturated colour palette and a certain remoteness to the directing style which only lightens in some of the more emotional scenes between the father and his son. It's a film in which morality without the context of civilisation is questioned, with the son constantly asking, "Are we the good guys?" and the survivors finding their faith (either in God or in human nature), constantly challenged by circumstances. That it addresses this issues with a scarcity of dialogue for a modern film is all the more impressive, and is reflective of the book.

There have been some changes to accommodate the medium of film. There are a few more incidents along the road, maybe a few more characters who appear and interact with our protagonists (though still a bare handful), and there's a couple of moments where cliche rears its ugly head (notably the boy's complete inability to shut up when possible hostile people are around, which I don't recall being so pronounced in the book), though these are mercifully brief. For a post-apocalyptic movie, there's also a near-total lack of modern special effects, with only one incongruous CGI establishing shot in the whole film (although no doubt much more subtle CGI manipulation of images occurs throughout). This adds to the sense of realism. The film is also well-paced and fairly short for a modern picture at about 100 minutes in length. On the minus side, Charlize Theron's character has more screentime than in the book, which you'd expect to mean her character receives more development, but this isn't really the case, and an early scene involving a truck full of nefarious folk up to no good briefly makes you think you're watching Mad Max (for all of about five seconds though, so not a huge issue), which isn't really the tone the creators were going for.

The Road (****½) is fascinating, well-acted, impressively-directed and unflinching, whilst occasionally sounding a note of hope. The film is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is one of the USA's biggest and most important literary novelists, laden with awards and praise throughout his lengthy career. It is almost unnecessary to review The Road, his latest novel, as it has already won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and garnered a major sales-boosting appearance on Oprah Winfrey's US book club, but it was a book of such impressive power I felt compelled to add my thoughts.


Some have already argued that The Road is not really science fiction, since the book features nearly nothing about the holocaust that destroyed civilisation before the book began (there are hints of it being either a nuclear war or an asteroid impact), little about how humanity develops afterwards (aside from the obvious descent into barbarism) and little in the way of an effective plot. The story is instead a series of viginettes that follow the unnamed protagonist ('the man') and his unnamed son ('the boy') as they head south, away from the freezing winter that is consuming the devastated USA, hoping to find a safe haven along the coast. Along the way they occasionally meet other survivors, they loot abandoned shops and homes, and find themselves relying on one another to keep going. However, science fiction is more than just about machines and sociology: it's about people, and how the impact of a future event (such as an atomic holocaust or an meteor strike) effects them and their lives. In this regard, The Road is essential science fiction.

The book is beautifully, starkly written. McCarthy employs a stripped-down prose style with some minor embellishments to keep the story moving. Given that many pages are covered by simple, short sentences as the man and the boy exchange views, the book is actually much shorter than its 300-page count would suggest, and easily readable in a couple of hours. The lack of plot is unnecessary, as this is a stunning atmospheric mood piece with some biting observations on the nature of humanity.

It is difficult to find anything worth criticising about the book. Some may feel there isn't enough plot or backstory or in-depth character history, but that's not the aim of the work. It's about two people and what keeps them going when everything else has been destroyed. In that regard, it works brilliantly. There are some vague similarities to earlier works - this could almost be said to be a road trip (but less revelatory) version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - but nothing that is particularly offputting.

The Road (*****) is a haunting novel of impressive power, and well worth reading. The book is published by Vintage Books in the USA and Picador in the United Kingdom. William Lexner has reviewed the book here.