The Road to A Great Movie

The movie The Road, based on the book by 

Cormac McCarthy, was shocking even though

I knew what would happen next, and disturbing 

even after having read each event in vivid detail.

This is because the filmmaking was executed

perfectly. Dark, gloomy, and filled with ash (as 

much as the beginning of the book emphasized), 

the hopeless wreckage of the man and the boy's

lives were perfectly depicted. The casting was

phenomenally done as well. Viggo Mortensen

and Kodi Smitt-McPhee captured the desperation

and fear of McCarthy's post-apocolyptic world. I could see 

the hunger in their eyes, feel the dust of burnt out dreams on their 

fingertips, hear the sound of their hollow emotions with every footstep. 

The Road established this beautifully tragic sense of disaster; tragic in the raw and 

brutal world of ruins that lay around them, but beautiful in the improbable hope 

and light found in the character of the boy. Yes, McCarthy was the creator 

of this character, but it was the creators of the film that truly brought 

the boy to life, as well as McPhee himself, who was able to endow

in the boy the kind of crushing fear and sense of lost that makes

the audience almost taste it. The underlying current beneath 

the fear, however, is a glimmer in the boy's eyes, some 

telling way that he speaks, moves, and reacts that 

somehow communicates that he will survive. It is as

if he and the man are sacred, like they are carrying the 

fire but it is more than a torch, it is an eternal flame. There 

is only so much that can be communicated in unspoken words 

and unused punctuation in McCarthy's writing. The movie, however, speaks volumes for the little humanity that remains in the world of the man and the boy. This sense of goodness, contrasted with the horrifyingly vivid images of burned corpses, or, even worse, the half eaten

And very much alive people found in the basement of a cellar. This imagery, 

unable to be truly captured in the pages of the book, make the movie so 

much more real. From the eerie quiet, to the uncensored filth of the 

human body, the filmography of The Road  makes it one of the

most frightfully honest  and  accurately depicted movies, 

both as a book adaption, as well as on it's own,

of today's dystopian-obsessed youth era.

PS. The Road reminds me of the lyrics to that Justin Timberlake song...

"I turn my head to the East,

I don't see nobody by my side,

I turn my head to the West,

Still nobody in sight

So I turn my head to the North 

Swallow that pill that they call pride

That old me is  dead and gone 

But that new me will be alright

Oh, Ive been travelin' on this road too long

Just tryna find my way back home 

The old me is dead and gone 

Dead and gone"