the road 2009 movie review

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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 Reviews

While The Road is not without its impressive aspects, it has not efficiently pulled taut the slack created by the loss of McCarthy’s commanding prose. And so, it is hard to avoid the sense that it needn’t have been made at all.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 7, 2024

Plan to see it twice—once to familiarize yourself with its unconventional, non-commercial method of storytelling, and a second time that allows you to submerge into the material, to appreciate how stunningly composed it is.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2023

While such a depressing, disturbing and disquieting conceit will not be everyone's ideal of almost two hours entertainment, The Road is one of the great films of the 21st century.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2023

I still recommend The Road; just keep in mind that this is Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale, not Richard Matheson's.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2022

One of the more impressive displays of solemn storytelling and superb acting seen this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 29, 2020

The sensation this harrowing film evokes in the viewer is one that feels far more appropriate for a story dealing with catastrophe - gut-clenching dread.

Full Review | Nov 26, 2020

Somehow I am captivated by what I see in 'The Road', John Hillcoat's post-apocalyptic drama adapted from Cormac McCarthy's work. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 5, 2020

The opposite of escapist entertainment, this rugged and wearing screen experience is tough, uncompromising stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 26, 2020

The Road may appear - at face value at least - to be a muted, subdued and frankly rather quiet approximation of an Apocalypse. But it's precisely this that gives it so much power.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 29, 2019

One of the more interesting films to come out in 2009.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 16, 2019

Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe have successfully recreated the barren, grey, burnt out landscape... Mortensen is admirable as the man journeying with his son and it's bleak in a way that Hollywood rarely dares to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2018

I cannot say how faithful this is but, having read other McCarthy books, would say the novel probably repaid your attention with its astonishing prose. This, though, puts you through the wringer, but doesn't repay you in any way.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2018

It's fascinating to see the world become an empty vessel, but all The Road pours back into it are hollow truisms.

Full Review | May 23, 2018

It wasn't fascinating at all. The movie looked like it cost $500 to make, excluding actors' salaries, which were worth another $500.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2018

I'm not asking for the end of the world to be a thrill-ride, but maybe it could have been less of a meretricious trudge.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2017

Even with the brief cameos by Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce, The Road doesn't meet expectations.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Sep 11, 2017

The Road is a murky harbinger of our future, but perhaps more urgently, a cautionary tale clearly reflecting our present.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2017

A remarkable, haunting picture worth multiple viewings.

Full Review | Sep 24, 2014

The Road is one of the year's strongest dramas. But it's no picnic, to say the least.

Full Review | Mar 11, 2014

There's about as much action as My Dinner With Andre.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2014

The Weinstein Company

Summary Based on Cormac McCarthy's beloved, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen leads an all-star cast in the big screen adaptation of The Road, the epic post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that d ... Read More

Directed By : John Hillcoat

Written By : Joe Penhall, Cormac McCarthy

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DVD & Streaming
Action/Adventure , Drama , Horror , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

November 25, 2009
Viggo Mortensen as The Man; Kodi Smit-McPhee as The Boy; Charlize Theron as The Wife; Robert Duvall as The Old Man; Michael K. Williams as The Thief; Guy Pearce as The Veteran; Molly Parker as The Veteran’s Wife

Home Release Date

May 25, 2010
John Hillcoat

Distributor

Dimension Films

Movie Review

“The clocked stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.”

That’s all we ever learn of the apocalypse that has decimated creation in The Road . Only a remnant of roving, ravaged—and ravaging—survivors remains to scavenge in the ruins of humanity.

“Each day is more gray than the one before,” says one survivor, known simply as the Man, “as the world slowly dies.”

All has perished. There are no crops. No vegetation. No animals. But the Man, we learn, has something to live for: his son, whom he lovingly calls the Boy. Though there is no hope, the Man and the Boy (who’s perhaps 9 years old and who was born after the apocalypse) soldier on, foraging for scraps of nourishment—a lone can of soda, a frozen grasshopper—that might sustain them another day.

Their goal is to make it to the coast, where things might somehow be better. But the road south is a long and treacherous one.

Positive Elements

The Road is a bleak film that focuses your attention on what it means to hold on to your hope, your humanity and your family in a world bent on devouring all three.

Most of the movie revolves around the Man seeking to protect and provide for his son. That means finding food and huddling together under old blankets in the rain. It means washing the Boy’s hair and cutting it for the first time ever when they find a bunker full of supplies. And it means protecting him from roving gangs of cannibals. “I’ll kill anyone who touches you,” he tells the Boy, “’cause that’s my job.” The stark brutality of the post-cataclysmic world they live in is matched—or perhaps exceeded—by the Man’s tender care for his charge.

The Man also works to impart something of a moral core to his son as they wander. “Sometimes I tell the Boy stories of courage and justice, he says. He tells his son, “There aren’t many good guys left. … Keep carrying the fire,” a reference to trying, against all odds, to maintain something like optimism and human decency in their desperate situation.

The Boy internalizes those lessons. When the subject of cannibalism comes up, he says, “We would never eat anybody, would we? No matter how hungry we are? ’Cause we’re the good guys, and we’re carrying the fire.”

The Boy’s compassion is evident in two situations. It’s his idea to share food with an old man they meet. And when he and his dad catch a thief who’s stolen all their possessions, it’s the Boy’s good heart that prevails. The Man forces the interloper to relinquish their stuff and strip naked. When the Thief protests, “I’m begging, you ain’t got to do me like this,” the Man replies, “I’m going to leave you here the way you left us.” But the Boy will have none of it, and eventually convinces his father to return the man’s clothes and give him a bit of food.

The Man’s dogged determination to survive contrasts with that of his wife, whom, we learn, eventually surrendered the will to live. Despite the fact that the Man tells her, “We will survive this. We are not going to quit,” she walks out into the cold one night to die.

The Man refuses to do that.

When a killing cough creeps into the Man’s chest, he redoubles his efforts to remind his son of all the things he needs to know to survive. As the Man nears death, the Boy cries, “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” And his father replies, “I’m sorry. Oh my boy, my boy. You have my whole heart. You always did.”

[ Spoiler Warning ] After the Man’s passing, the Boy meets a family that adopts him. The Boy quizzes them, asking if they eat people, if they’re the good guys, and if they have the fire inside. The family, a military veteran, his wife and two children, assure him that they’re not cannibals and tell him that he was lucky to have had such a caring father. The Boy’s final words to his deceased father are, “I’ll talk to you every day. And I won’t forget, no matter what. No matter what, Papa.”

Spiritual Elements

The Man implies that his son’s existence is somehow proof of God, saying, “If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.”

While dreaming about his wife in better days, the Man says, “If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different.”

Later, the travelers encounter a nearly blind old man who says of the Boy, “I never thought I’d see a child again. He’s an angel, a god.” The Man agrees, saying, “To me he’s a god.”

The Man and the Old Man also ponder God’s role in what’s happened. “Maybe God would know,” the Man suggests. To which the bitter Old Man says, “God would know what? Whoever made humanity will find no humanity here.”

A couple of conversations allude to seeing loved ones again in the afterlife.

Sexual Content

Flashbacks and dreams show the Wife in clingy shirts and thin pajamas. The Man dreams of running his hand up his wife’s skirt at a concert of some kind.

Two scenes show the Man’s naked backside (and a bit more than that in one shot) as he swims. When he asks the thief to strip, we see the man’s bare front very briefly, and then glimpse him from the side, naked, as he covers his privates.

Violent Content

The Wife says of the people apparently pursuing them, “They’re going to catch up to us and they’re going to kill us. They’re going to rape me. They’re going to rape your son. They’re going to kill us. And they’re going to eat us.”

Her fears are well-founded. When a gang of cannibals discovers the Man and the Boy, one of them looks at the young lad and smacks his lips before grabbing him and putting a knife to his neck. The Man shoots their assailant in the head.

Father and son find what they think is an abandoned house, but it turns out that a number of near-naked, zombie-like victims are imprisoned in the cellar—food for the four cannibals who live there. Visible wounds on the prisoners’ bodies indicate that they’re perhaps eating each other, too.

Given the prospect of such treatment, the Man coaches the boy in detail how to take his own life with their pistol should the need arise. The Man also ponders if he could go through with taking his son’s life if doing so meant sparing him from the cannibals.

It’s an exceedingly grim subject, and it’s driven home as we watch the Man put the pistol to his terrified son’s forehead during a moment of extreme danger.

We are shown what’s left of a victim’s entrails. We see three bodies hanging in a barn, a decomposed corpse in a bed and blood on the snow. We hear the screams of a woman and child who’ve fallen into the clutches of a hungry gang.

The Man gets hit in the leg with an arrow; after the attack, he digs out the head and staples the wound shut. His assailant ends up dead on the receiving end of a flare gun. We also witness the Man vomit blood a couple of times. Trees fall on the Man and the Boy during an earthquake. We hear the Wife screaming as she gives birth.

Crude or Profane Language

Four or five f-words. (One is paired with “mother.”) At least one s-word. God’s name is take in vain a half-dozen times, usually in combination with “d‑‑n.” Jesus’ name is misused once. We hear one extremely harsh slang reference to oral sex.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The Man smokes a cigarette once and sips from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When the Boy asks for a drink, his father tells him he wouldn’t like it.

Other Negative Elements

The Wife says that her “heart was ripped out” the night their son was born. “I don’t want to do this,” she says after her water breaks. “What kind of life is this?” Before she commits suicide, she tries to convince her husband to let her take the Boy’s life as well to spare him the presumed horrors of his future. “Other families are doing it,” she desperately says.

Tenderness and brutality , as a general rule, don’t share the same screen during an action movie. The Road , then, is not your typical apocalyptic thriller.

There are no skyscrapers toppling. No tectonic plates smashing into the sea. No fireballs from the sky. No aircraft carriers being swept by tsunamis into the White House. In contrast to its peers, The Road (based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2006 novel) is a study in understatement and soul-numbing psychological tension.

It’s a tale of one human being trying to protect another from unthinkable threats. It’s the story of a father preparing his son for the day his dad will no longer be around. And as this father and son seek to eke out an existence in a wasteland that used to be our world (much of the movie was filmed near Mount St. Helens and in areas of Louisiana ravaged by Hurricane Katrina), three moral mires emerge: suicide, cannibalism and mercy killing.

The Wife’s suicide is shown to obviously, deeply and permanently hurt those who love her. And cannibalism clearly extinguishes the “fire” inside. Which leaves us to deal more extensively with the last of the three: mercy killing.

The Man’s multifaceted love for the Boy tugs at the heartstrings in a way that feels at times like an old Disney movie. But no father in an old Disney movie ever taught his son how to put a pistol in his mouth just the right way. So there’s far more here to process than flowery feelings of familial love.

We never actually witness anyone eat anyone else. But just the thought of it is chilling enough … and chilling enough to cause this loving father to contemplate taking his own son’s life. Might it be the more loving thing to do should they fall into the wrong hands? he wonders.

He’s clearly ready to go through with it when things look grim. But circumstances spare him from finally pulling the trigger.

And that brings us back to tenderness and brutality. The tenderness of wanting to ensure that a loved one never has to suffer. And the brutality we sometimes start thinking might be required to make sure they won’t.

It’s an increasingly popular subject these days. And Hollywood is increasingly including it as a plot point. The list of films that have recently dealt with it is long; The Descent , The Beach, The Life of David Gale, Harsh Times, The Sea Inside and Alexander are all on it. Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby essentially presents mercy killing as an evil deed that does so much good one’s very soul is worth losing in its wake.

The Road takes a different path. It lets you wonder what you might do if you were facing such supreme despair. Then it introduces hope in the Man’s final breaths. The Boy begs to go with his father as he dies. His father refuses. “I thought I could,” he says. “But I can’t.”

The Man and the Wife have both lived and died fearing the very worst. What the Boy finds is that sometimes it’s not the devil creeping up behind you. It’s the good guys. Maybe it’s even God.

A postscript: Ultimately mercy killing is a theological issue more than a sociological one. And it’s an issue this review fails to adequately address. Instead, it can merely hint at one aspect that’s worth considering, especially when it comes to entertainment: Very often onscreen renderings allow extreme circumstances to dictate our emotional responses.

That creates an obvious straw man diverting attention away from the theological truth that life’s sanctity is not determined by context—even an unthinkable one. And beyond that, we’re simply fallible creatures who don’t have the wherewithal to make God-like decisions of life and death. What happens, one has to ponder, if deliverance comes three seconds after you pull the trigger?

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

Steven Isaac

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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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In a dangerous post-apocalyptic world, an ailing father defends his son as they slowly travel to the sea.
It's a post-apocalyptic world, several years after whatever the cataclysmic event, which has in turn caused frequent quakes as further potential hazards. The world is gray and getting quickly grayer as more and more things die off. A man and his pre-teen son, who was born after the apocalypse, are currently on the road, their plan to walk to the coast and head south where the man hopes there will be a more hospitable environment in which to live. The man has taught his son that they are the "good people" who have fire in their hearts, which in combination largely means that they will not resort to cannibalism to survive. The man owns a pistol with two bullets remaining, which he will use for murder/suicide of him and his son if he feels that that is a better fate for them than life in the alternative. Food and fuel are for what everyone is looking. The man has taught his son to be suspect of everyone that they may meet, these strangers who, out of desperation, may not only try to steal what they have managed to scavenge for their own survival, but may kill them as food. Although life with his father in this world is all the boy has known, he may come to his own thoughts as to what it means holistically to be one of the good or one of the bad. Meanwhile, the man occasionally has thoughts to happier times with his wife/the boy's mother before the apocalypse, as well as not as happy times with her after the apocalypse and the reason she is no longer with them. — Huggo
A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son make their way across a post-apocalyptic United States in hopes of finding civilization among-st the nomadic cannibal tribes in 2929 Productions' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's thrilling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road. John Hillcoat (The Proposition) directs from a screenplay provided by Joe Penhall. Charlize Theron co-stars in the Dimension Films release.
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. — yusufpiskin
The movie opens in a flashback where we see the Man (Viggo Mortensen) in bed with his wife (Charlize Theron). The man wakes up to a sound and a glow coming from outside the window of their room. He walks to the window and looks out. In a hurry, he then runs into the bathroom where he begins to fill the sink and bathtub. His wife wakes up and comes into the bathroom. She asks him why he is taking a shower, but answers that this is not what the water is for. She then looks outside to see what he saw. The scene then cuts to the present where the man is walking with his son down a snow-covered road. As the Man and his son are walking, we hear a narration by the Man explaining that he no longer keeps track of time. He further explains (in a very vague way) that a few years ago at 1:17, there was a bright flash in the sky followed by rumbling sounds and that was when time stopped. As the Man and his son walk and search abandoned cars, the narration continues. He then says that the sun has not come out for a long time; the weather is getting colder and greyer every day. He then says the things he fears the most are cannibals and hunger. They are walking to the coast and heading south to see if things are warmer and better there. The Man and his son stop at a car in the road and make camp. While they sit in the car talking, we see that the Man has a pistol with 2 rounds remaining and a shopping cart full of things they have collected. The two talk about the boy's mother, making it clear that she has been dead for a significant time. The Man also explains to the son how to kill himself the right way with the gun, and that the remaining 2 bullets are for themselves. As they continue their journey, we see several flashbacks to the Man and his wife. We witness her giving birth to their son and that she reluctantly did so, apparently aware that the life they would give him would be hopeless. Right then the flashback ends as the man wakes up suddenly to the sound of a truck in the distance. He wakes his son and they run out of the truck they were sleeping in into the nearby woods, leaving the cart. They jump and hide in a ditch. From the tunnel emerges a large truck carrying several armed men. One stranger walks very close to the hiding Man and his son, and stops to urinate on a tree. He notice the father and son and tries to lure them to the truck, stating that they eat "Whatever we can find". The Man points the gun at the stranger and tells him to not look back at the men he came with or that he will shoot. He refuses and calls the Man's bluff. As the noise of the truck startles the Man, the stranger jumps and grabs the son, holding him at knifepoint. The Man shoots the stranger in the head, grabs his son and runs into the woods hiding over night avoiding the group who were looking for them. The next morning, the Man and his son go back for the cart. The contents of their cart have been pillaged. While the Man gathers the remainer of his things, he notices a pile of intenstines, as well as the clothing and severed head of the man that was killed the day before. It is evident that the men in the truck would have eaten our protagonists had they came out into the open. In a flashback, we see the Man and his wife talking about killing themselves like the other families in the area. She says that eventually they will be caught, that she and their son be raped, that all three will be murdered and eaten. He says that she needs to be strong and stop talking about this bleak scenario. She says that they only have 2 bullets left and that they should use them now. Unable to deal with her bleak outlook on the future, he leaves the room. Returning to the main story, the Man and rest by their campfire. The son asks if they are still the good guys. The Man explains that they are always going to be the good guys, and they are carrying the fire inside themselves. Back on the road, the man and his son rest in an abandonned truck. The son mentions that he sometimes wishes that he was dead, partially so he could be with his mother. Telling his son that he shouldn't be thinking or talking about her too much, the man contemplates some of the last memories of his wife. In the morning, the Man wakes up and walks to the edge of the bridge where he takes a wallet out of his jacket with a picture of his wife in it. He throws it over the bridge and leaves his wedding ring behind. We get another flashback of the Man and his wife talking. She has given up all hope and has decided to comitt suicide. He begs her to stay another night. She blames the man for not letting her die earlier and walks outside without saying goodbye to the son. She takes off her jacket and outer clothing and walks off into the dark to die. The two walk on and see a large house in the distance. After looking at it through binoculars, they decide to go into the home. In the main room, they notice a large pile of shoes. The Man is very confused and goes into the kitchen where he sees a large door in the floor, closed via padlock. They break in and go down into the cellar. They hear something in the darkness and when they get close, a naked man comes into the light. As they attempt to leave, they see that the naked man is not alone. An entire group of malnourished people, some missing limbs beg them for help. They fight off the desperate captives and block the door with a heavy table. As they are about to leave, the owners of the house return. The Man and his son run upstairs and hide in a bathroom. As one of the captors approaches, the father points the gun at his son's head to protect him from the cannibals. Luckily for them, the cannibals are distracted by the captives attempting to make an escape. In the commotion, the Man and his son run out and quickly hide while the people in the home try to find them. As night falls, they hear the screams of someone being butchered. As they are walking, they find the neighborhood where the Man grew up and he takes a moment to visit his boyhood home. While waiting outside, the son briefly sees a boy across the street. He runs to see him, but is caught by his father. They leave, once again heading south, the boy lamenting the fact that he is probably the only boy left alive. Having run out of food, the two come across another home on the road. They rummage through the house and find the remains of a man who died in bed. Having lost hope, they stumble upon an unlooted bomb shelter in the back yard. Finding ample food and supplies inside, they eat, clean themselves up and make home in the new shelter. One night, they hear noises above. The noise sounds like a dog, meaning that the area is no longer safe. They stock up food in a pull cart and head out the next morning. As they are walking, they see an old man (Robert Duvall) walking. They approach him very carefully and see that he is no threat. The boy wants to bring him along and the Man says no, but he allows the old man to eat dinner with them. As they eat and talk, the old man says that he thought the boy was an angel and he never thought he would see a child again. They continue to talk and then go to sleep. The next day the Man and the son are on their way alone again. While the Man and the son continue, they go into the woods and leave the cart because they see a series of wooden huts. As they walk closer, the Man sees a row of spears with human skulls and other human remains on the ground. Quickly turning the other way, they see a fresh pile of blood-soaked snow.In the distance, a woman and a child are being chased by a band of cannibals. The Man and the son get away while we hear the dying screams of the woman. This frightful sight is followed by a small earthquake. Multiple trees almost hit them and they take cover and hide. After the dust has settled, they get back to the road once again. After they Man and son wake up from camp, we see that the Man is growing sicker. They talk about how they are close to the ocean. Arriving, they are both disappointed at the receding beach, which is littered with garbage and debris. The ocean, which the boy had hoped would be blue, is a muddy brown. They walk to the water and look at a crashed boat about 200 yards into the surf. Hoping to find something useful inside the wreck, the man leaves his son with the revolver in their makeshift tent. The son falls asleep and we see a stranger with a knife walk up to the tent. The next shot is of the Man swimming back to shore with a flare gun from the boat. He puts on his clothes and goes running to his son. All of their supplies are gone, but the son is not harmed. The thief took everything including the Mans shoes. Cursing, the man is determined to retrieve their belongings. As the Man carries his son, they see the thief with their cart in the distance. The Man takes the pistol and runs after the thief. The Man proceeds to take back his belongings and rob the thief, taking his knife, his clothes and his shoes. The son begs his father to have mercy on the man, but he refuses. Back on the beach, the boy is very upset and sulks, eventually convincing his father to return the stolen belongings to their owner. They go back and try to find the thief, but he is nowhere to be seen. They leave his clothes in apile, along with a can of food.The Man and his son continue walking. They start walking through a street lined with homes. It is quiet and they find a tin with a live bug inside. While it flies away, they both stare at it in amazement. Distracted, the Man does not notice an archer across the street and gets hit in the leg. They jump to take cover and the Man retaliates with his flare gun. We hear screaming from the room and the wounded Man goes running to see who is inside. He gets in the room where he sees a woman who is sitting over the stranger who shot him. The archer is dead and the woman accompanying him weeps. Our heroes bandage up the man's leg as best they can, leaving the woman. The Man and his son go walking back to the ocean and the man stops. He says he can no longer pull the cart. They take a bag full of the food and they head to a sandy spot of the beach. They make camp and the man, realizing that he is dying dreams of his wife. We see what life was like prior to the world ending. He wakes up to his son talking to him. The Man knows he is going to die soon, and he tells his son to continue on south. He says to remember the things he has taught him and to keep going like they have been. The son says he wants to die with his father, but the Man says that he cannot. He says that his whole heart is in his son and he has to go on. He then falls asleep and dies. After a period of mourning, the son looks at his father, reaches into his jacket and takes his binoculars. He then covers the Man with a blanket, puts the pistol with single round into his belt and begins walking along the shoreline. In the distance, we see a stranger (Guy Pierce) walking toward the son. The son points his gun towards the stranger, but amazingly, the man does not reciprocate. He tells the boy that he is not a cannibal and that he is "one of the good guys". The stranger asks the son who the man on the beach is and the son explains that it was his father. The stranger explains to the boy that he now has 2 choices. Either go on his own, avoiding the roads or joining him and the others that he is travelling with.The son asks if he has any children, to which the answer says "a boy and a girl". Asking if he is carrying the fire inside, to which the stranger does not know how to answer, the boy decides to join them. Saying goodbye to his father one last time, the son walks to the stranger. We see that he is with a woman (Molly Parker) and 2 children, a boy and a girl. The boy was the one the Son spotted earlier by his father's childhood home. We learn that this family has been following the boy for some time, and that the dog they heard earlier at the bomb shelter was their companion. He is assured that he no longer has anything to worry about.

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Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Road (2009)

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Common sense media reviewers.

Touching but grim futuristic tale won't appeal to kids.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Overall the movie creates a feeling of hopelessnes

The man is something of a positive role model, sin

Not a huge quantity of violent scenes, but what's

Several (though not constant) uses of both "f--k"

Even in a desolate future, a few brand-name produc

In the bunker scene, the man opens a bottle of whi

Positive Messages

Overall the movie creates a feeling of hopelessness, with its relentlessly gray world destroyed by the hand of man (though it's never explained exactly what happened). But the man still clings to his responsibility to raise and teach the boy all the things he knows, in the hope that there still might be a future, somehow. Likewise, their continuing journey to the sea is also based on the hope that something will still be there.

Positive Role Models

The man is something of a positive role model, since he continues to hope and to plan a future for his boy, no matter how uncertain it may be. But at the same time, he succumbs to frustration and paranoia and refuses to trust anyone. The boy, born after the disaster, turns out to be the movie's real role model. He's open-hearted and wishes to help others, and his hope is purer.

Violence & Scariness

Not a huge quantity of violent scenes, but what's included can be quite disturbing. There's plenty of suicide and suggestions of suicide, with people giving up hope in a hopeless future -- including the boy's mother, who kills herself with a gun. At one point, roadside bandits threaten the heroes, gunshots are exchanged, and a man is killed. A gun is also pointed at the boy. More guns are used to threaten people. The man is shot by arrows from a crossbow, which is followed by a bloody, gruesome "first-aid" scene. The man and boy also find a flare gun. Cannibalism is suggested but not shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several (though not constant) uses of both "f--k" and "s--t," as well as "hell," "damn," "goddamn," and "ass."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Even in a desolate future, a few brand-name products survive. The man and the boy find a last can of Coca-Cola in a vending machine, and in one major scene, they find an underground bunker stocked with food. The boy eats Cheetos and mispronounces their name: "Chee-TOSS." The man and the boy drink Vitamin Water. Some labels can be briefly glimpsed in the background.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

In the bunker scene, the man opens a bottle of whisky and drinks. The boy wants to know what it is and wants to taste it, but the man refuses. "It makes you feel funny," he says.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Road (based on the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy) is a relentlessly grim, gray portrait of a future in which an unnamed disaster has wiped most living things from the Earth, food is scarce, and people have resorted to cannibalism. (In other words, not a kid movie!) The main characters are a man ( Viggo Mortensen ) and his 10-year-old son; their relationship is wonderfully touching and ever hopeful, but the surrounding movie is depressing and sometimes violent, with many depictions of and references to suicide (including the boy's mother), as well as some scenes with gunfire and threats. Though older teens and adults may find it a meaningful, if not exactly entertaining, experience, know that it's not the Mad Max -type action movie that some ads have promised. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (19)
Kids say (16)

Based on 19 parent reviews

Sad but emotional

What's the story.

In the future, an unnamed disaster has ravaged Earth, wiping out most animal and plant life. Electricity is gone, food is scarce, and everything has turned cold and gray from falling ash. A man ( Viggo Mortensen ) and his 10-year-old son ( Kodi Smit-McPhee ) make their way along the dangerous road toward the coast in the hopes of finding something -- anything -- there. Along the way, they meet some dangerous cannibals -- as well as some good people -- and together they must nurture their fragile flame of hope.

Is It Any Good?

The Road is a well-made movie and a powerful story. But despite the characters' persistent hope, the relentlessly grim material -- including the constant, cold, gray visuals -- can be overwhelming, somewhat stalling the drama's forward momentum. Indeed, it's hard to argue that Hillcoat's intense visual presentation adds anything to or improves upon McCarthy's spare prose. Overall though, The Road is effective -- and interesting as a comparison for those who loved the book.

Australian director John Hillcoat ( The Proposition ) has brought the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy ( No Country for Old Men ) to the screen faithfully, with only a few dramatic additions for the actors' benefit, as well as at least one action-oriented sequence. The emotional core of the movie is the same as the book: the moving relationship between the man and his son and the way they rely on each other for hope and survival.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the unnamed disaster that brought the world to this point. What would life be like after something like that? What could or couldn't you do anymore?

Why is the boy more hopeful and trustworthy than his father? What could the boy know or understand that his father doesn't?

What made the boy's mother commit suicide? Why did she give up hope when the man and the boy still had hope?

Movie Details

In theaters : November 25, 2009
On DVD or streaming : May 25, 2010
Cast : Charlize Theron , Kodi Smit-McPhee , Viggo Mortensen
Director : John Hillcoat
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Dimension
Genre : Drama
Run time : 119 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some violence, disturbing images and language
Last updated : January 4, 2024

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Movie Review: The Road (2009)

James Barron
Movie Reviews
No responses
--> June 7, 2010

The Road centers on an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) struggling to survive in a hellish, post-apocalyptic world. Their intense journey will leave you feeling drained but ultimately satisfied. Okay, that last part made it sound like I was reviewing a porno. Emotionally drained is a better description for how the movie will leave you. That’s because the viewer is quickly and completely drawn into the bleak, desperate atmosphere as our two protagonists fight to stay alive by any means necessary.

Don’t, however, go into this movie expecting your average Hollywood end-of-the-world story. There are no hordes of CGI monsters. No wild car chases through abandoned streets. And no Will Smith making sarcastic wise-cracks. It’s just normal human beings battling starvation and disease. Indeed, the most terrifying moments of The Road involve acts of unspeakable depravity committed by regular people. Cannibalism has run rampant. Violence is an everyday occurrence — so much so that the characters never appear to be truly safe.

With each abandoned shelter, each deserted highway, there’s a sense of danger lurking just around the corner. Director John Hillcoat helps build this atmosphere of despair by filling his palate with tones of gray and black. Billowing clouds of smoke envelope the sun. Trees are plastered with soot and grime. Let’s just say it’s not exactly spring break in Cancun.

Yet for all the gloom and doom, the heart of the movie is truly uplifting: It’s a story about a father and son depending on one another in times of need. On one hand, the father protects and cares for his son. In turn, the son gives his father hope, gives him a reason to go on. Every interaction between the two is believable and enjoyable thanks to inspired performances by both Viggo and Kodi. Both actors give raw, authentic portrayals that really bear the hearts and minds of their characters. In the end, The Road is both a depressing study of human nature pushed to the limit and a heartwarming testament to the unwavering bond between father and son. It is a film I highly recommend.

I find flaws with much that I see and they usually start when looking in the mirror.

Movie Review: Clash of the Titans (2010)

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Lewis Everett

What it's about.

A Cormac McCarthy novel adaptation (like No Country for Old Men), The Road is an apocalypse movie set in a 'scorched Earth' rendition of the world. It follows a father (played by Viggo Mortensen) and his son as they battle to survive everyday life. Throughout the movie, the son's trust in his father grows and shrinks depending on choices the father makes, as he attempts to protect his son from cannibals, bandits, and the threat of starvation. The gritty realism this movie presents sets it apart from many other more theatrical releases, with the setting of a charred world illustrating a rather depressing new reality. A very down to earth and heartfelt story. Definitely worth the watch if you're willing to feel like you've been punched in the gut.

The 345 Critic

This is a good movie but there is absolutely nothing positive about this film. Do not watch if you are depressed or sad. I had the hardest time watching it because of all the dreariness. OMG that was hard. The acting was superb and they even tossed in Robert Duvall. The flashbacks got a bit annoying, but overall, a very good depressing movie.

I just wish I knew where they filmed all of those locations. That was incredible.

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The Road Is the Most Important Movie of the Year

Originally published in the June 2009 issue

At one point in The Road, a moment that is never otherwise explained or referenced, the father and the son stare at a dead forest as it burns. The fire leers profanely from one edge of the screen to the other. Dense and hot, certainly loud, it's the sort of fire from which there is no safe distance. It feels like the two of them should get out of there. From the get-go, the father and son have moved. And yet now they stand there watching the fire, dazed, like two drunks gazing out the window of a Laundromat at a mushroom cloud.

Move, guys. Move.

Everything about the film seems disconnected in this way — shocky and post-traumatic. This is what happens: A father and a son walk from point A to point B through a desolate landscape. Cities are deserted. People-zombies, some of them hungry for human flesh, stare out from abandoned office buildings and sometimes hunt other people. It's always cloudy. Everything is dead. There is no color left in anything — not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. Ruined, wrecked, used up — it is our world, consumed at its edges by fire, at its center by rot.

Sounds awful, because it goddamned well is. But it's awful, too, as in full of awe. Awful as in you cannot avert your gaze. It's hard not to watch a fire.

When they do move, the father and the son progress through a quietly seething dream, a world at its end. When they run from danger, they clank and rustle and seem wetly destined to never get away. When the father grips the boy's mouth to quiet him, it is too rough. Rivers seem to be icy sloughs of poison. Yet they swim. They are a father and son. They carry two bullets. Anytime the man turns his back on the boy or separates from him, it feels — in a way that scary, apocalyptic movies often do — as if everything will end. But in those movies, the end never really comes. You know that going in, because generally those movies just flirt with the apocalypse, just offer a little look-see at a tidal wave or a nuclear blast.

The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there — and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.

You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. Not because it may be important. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. Not because it horrifies. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. All of that is so. Don't see it just because you loved the book. The movie stands alone. Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it's more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend.

Only this one is different: You won't want to see this one twice.

Consider this little tick of time in the life of The Road, a movie that hundreds of thousands of the book's readers, millions even, are waiting for, if only to vet the film's bleak topography of the ruined nation against the skull carpet of their own imagination: It's the moment when the producer chooses a trailer, itself a defining document for the potential moviegoing nation. This takes place in the offices of the distributor, Dimension Films, and features the huffing presence of one Bob Weinstein, wearing the most wrinkled shirt in the history of modern office life, sitting in his infamous miasma of consternation and excitement, speaking about The Road, which had its release date pushed back one full year last November. Everyone involved — director, producer, screenwriter — says there was no secret agenda to that, no worry to be inferred, no doubt on anyone's part about the final product. The movie, which required more than two hundred visual effects to decolorize a landscape stripped of life, simply wasn't ready.

Weinstein acknowledges that loyal readers of Cormac McCarthy's book, which was published in 2006, are probably worried. He's sitting in a conference room in Manhattan, about to pop in a DVD containing two potential trailers. He seems to be figuring out how to talk about the film as he goes, fighting contrary tugs from some internal narrator, giving in only by the slenderest of degrees to the urge to mollify two, three, four different audiences.

First, he calls it a literate action movie. At one point he calls it a zombie movie. Then he starts talking about his kids. "When I had my kids, I was grateful. I was like, Now there's something other to think about than me," he says, and that word — me — echoes in the star chamber. "Every parent has that. You don't have to have kids. You're human. If you can't relate to this story, then check your humanity somewhere. I felt this whole relationship with this father and son. Yeah. And yet it was thrilling."

People like to see certain components in movies concerning the end of the world. Asteroids. Alien visitation. Angels. Nuclear war. Tidal waves. Climate change. Giant robots. They seem to like leather. And hopped-up cars. Appearances by God. Buildings blow up, cities fall, in real time. Villains, always villains. Snakes are always good. A beautiful woman. But The Road offers none of that. (Except the last one: Charlize Theron has a supporting role as the mother, breathing a little more fully than her character does in the book, solely as the face of despair.)

Plus, let's face it: The Road does not inherently seem like an asses-in-the-seats proposition. It is adapted from a lyric, repetitive little book, one written in a fashion that nods at classic narrative structure only in its final pages. A book that has found two sorts of readers: the fanatics, who can't put it down, and the frustrated, who find it so dark, blatantly literary, rhythmically voicey, and without hope that they can't turn past page 3. While that doesn't necessarily frame it as a problem movie, it does make things hard to describe in the familiar contours of an X -meets- Y movie pitch. It's fair to wonder whether The Road will become an unimportant footnote in the wake of a best seller. Happens all the time. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Angela's Ashes. And movies mangle literary books, too. They turn arty and inexplicably beloved literary titles — The English Patient or The Hours — into arty and pretty forgettable movies. Worse, bad movies routinely make important stories less important. Three years ago, Emilio Estevez single-handedly killed any resurgent interest in the accomplishments of Bobby Kennedy.

"We had a lot of pressure when I went after this book," says producer Nick Wechsler, who pursued and optioned the novel in June 2006, before it was published. "There were other people who made offers, but they weren't large, because they were afraid of the material, obviously. It's very dark stuff. I simply responded to the book. I had no idea that it was going to gain the momentum that it did, become that talked about, that it would win the Pulitzer, get on Oprah. All of a sudden, I could see this was very precious to people, that there was a kind of public trust associated with this book. And we felt incredible pressure on delivering the movie that we felt would be a valid adaptation."

When Wechsler entered the life of The Road, the movie, chances were taken, creating a new interpretative alchemy. He selected a relatively unknown Australian director, John Hillcoat, whose previous feature-film work began and ended with The Proposition, a smallish Australian western starring Guy Pearce — a decent third-shelf offering at Blockbuster right now. Hillcoat, in turn, hired dark-rocker Nick Cave to compose the score and sought out Joe Penhall, an award-winning but obscure Australian playwright living in London, to write the screenplay. They moved fast — Penhall and Hillcoat were working on the script even as the book's fervent readership coalesced.

It's clear that Wechsler was toying with expectations even then. "It's a very small bull's-eye, this movie. In all aspects of putting it together, you don't want an audience going into the theater thinking they know what the ride is going to be."

Whatever topical agenda people attach to this film — global warming, the fall of nationalism, the perils of consumption — it won't matter. It isn't a vision of the future at all. This is a vision of the end. Like: In the end, there's only one can of Coke. Coke is about to be forgotten. In a collapsing mall, the father digs a single can out of a toppled vending machine. It falls to the floor like a weighty and singular apple. The father opens it and offers it to the boy as a treat. The boy drinks and insists that the father have some, too. They are like that: generous and genuine, even with the last details of a time the boy has never known. But the father gives almost all of it to his son, who stops for a moment, then asks, "Because it's the only one I'll ever have, right?" In that moment, he realizes not only what he has lost, but why his father wants him to have the soda at all. You can see he likes the Coke, too.

"This was a book that was written in a time of prosperity, and we got involved with it in a time of prosperity," says Marc Butan of Mark Cuban's 2929 Productions, which produced the film. "The lens that everyone is viewing through these days is very different. You look at it now and it has a different subtext. It's a count-your-blessings thing now."

Cormac McCarthy fathered a son as an old man, and this story is an ode to a ticking clock, to the diminishment of time, to last chances. Last chance to parent. Last chance to warn, to train, to prepare. The father fights to teach. And the father teaches the boy to fight. In the movie's first teaching moment, the father shows his son where to shoot himself in the head should it come to that. With the gun loaded. It is perhaps the movie's only lurid turn, a moment that, like almost every moment in the movie, appears in the book as well. By the time it occurs, it is understood to be a gesture of necessity. There they are, citizens of a kind of now, bad teeth and all, pallid, filthy, damp to the bone, at their end, and whether you've read the book or not, the sight of it makes you seize.

"It's a love story," Hillcoat says. "So it moves you in a way that is quite unexpected."

It is a love story. But to be clear, it's a love story about a father and a son hauling ass to keep from being eaten by small bands of flannel-shirted cannibals.

It's also a purposefully color-bare apologue of man and boy. The man is played by Viggo Mortensen, and he's in virtually every frame. "The interesting thing about picking an actor for a movie is, you want to try to surpass the audience's knowledge or expectations of what that actor's about," Hillcoat says. "We took a shot with Viggo as opposed to bigger box-office stars. In large part, he's the right choice because, as good as he is, he's still untapped." Mortensen is brilliant in insinuating the father's pain and communicating the hints of loss and his resistance to the inevitable. Burnt and sinewy in each scene, he registers a liquid panic in every glance at the woods and a sort of angry regret in every peek at the boy. Mortensen is a different filthy man in each function of fatherhood. You recognize them all, without voice-over, without undue exposition. He still cares. And it hurts more than ever to care.

Twelve-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee is beautiful and wretched, luminous and somehow smaller than his age as the boy. But he's full-blown in the part, his character concerned, like all boys, with the contents of his pockets, naturally curious about the few others they encounter — an old man, an elusive child, a thief, a dog barking at the unseen end of a collapsed mall. Mortensen and Smit-McPhee wrestle for control like any father and son — in dealing with strangers, in figuring out who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, in matters of privacy, and in the divergent ways they treat others. Elemental shit, really. Just some simple old-world parenting, long before people harvested human limbs for Sunday dinner.

The third major cast member of The Road is the setting itself, the world. The film's locations were perhaps the least well-kept secrets in the marketplace of prerelease Web sites about the movie. "Initially we were talking about [filming in] Australia or Iceland," Hillcoat says. "But all of our research took us to looking at images of events like Mount St. Helens, the volcanoes in the Philippines, Hiroshima, Katrina, a set of man-made and natural disasters that have been heavily photographed and filmed. My production designer, sitting in the countryside in Victoria, Australia, found eight miles of abandoned freeway in Pennsylvania on Google Earth, which gave us those dark tunnels. We deliberately used America's real apocalyptic zones. We went to New Orleans to shoot our interior shots in a ruined shopping mall in post-Katrina New Orleans. We used the strip mines in western Pennsylvania. Even billowing clouds in the background of one scene come from 9/11.

"When they pass through a city, there's a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There's a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape."

You don't recognize these presences as some timely message from our near past, as heralds of warning. Like the father and son, the scenes — the forgotten 18-wheeler jackknifed on a freeway bridge, the gas stations littered with useless contraptions, the sinister farmhouses, the sheds with their hand tools piled like ancient contrivances — all of it calls up the now. Grunged and toxic, sure, but sickeningly familiar. You cannot recognize enough to say where this is, but you recognize it. All of it.

When Bob Weinstein rolls those trailers, each one assumes the predictable arc of a story compressed to its essence. There is a speed to them that the actual movie — which I saw before seeing the trailers — does not possess or seek to possess, an urgency that feels manufactured. The music is pulse-pounding and urgent, driven to create absurd expectations of action in a movie that quietly elicits worry about the relative friability of the invisible paths that exist between people and what they need. Still, every utterance, every cry for help or hand clasped across the mouth of the boy to suppress a sob, is a fair-enough emanation from the heart of the movie.

The odd thing is, the start of each trailer includes glimpses of a storm, panicky news footage, little puzzle pieces of the world before it ended. No one — not the director or the myriad producers, not the novelist or the screenwriter — had ever even hinted at how it happened, until this.

For someone who loves the book, for anyone who knows the story going in, this is a moment you hoped would never come. Why remind us of the reductive logic of cause and effect? Before the question can be asked, Weinstein stands up, offers his hand, and says, "Okay, we're going with the first one." He gives no rationale. And so it seems the metonymic references to the national news, to the weather, to presumed military conflicts laid in as a tonally quiet explanation of what is never known in book or movie, for now will stay in the trailer.

On the other side of the planet, at home in Australia, Hillcoat's been hearing about these trailers. "We're so conditioned by postapocalyptic films to be centered on a big event, and they become this high-concept thing. And here there's this total absence, this negation of explanation. We have to stay with that. So yeah. That's gonna be a challenge."

In good times or in shit times, you can ask why people go to see movies at all. The Road may be a kind of historical countertwitch to Depression-era Busby Berkeley musicals, to a time when people used movie theaters as places to forget. (Although how a kaleidoscopic mess like 42nd Street ever generated hope in 1933 is baffling.) But make no mistake, hit or miss, The Road, a risky, dyspeptic, and serious road movie, will be easy to lampoon, to dismiss, to skip. Unwary couples will walk out. Teenagers in search of the comfort nipple of cinematic apocalypse, with its blank-slate promise and its tinny hope for a new tomorrow, will roll their eyes. Bill Hader is probably writing the SNL skit right now.

The other certainty is that everyone involved in this movie is working against the predictable imperatives of perhaps the most predictable movie genre of them all: the apocalyptic thriller. The great experiment of the movie is that it hangs on nothing if not the subversion of the conventions of the genre. These people want the same thing from The Road that Busby Berkeley wanted, the same thing any artist with a sense of urgency wants. They want for people to walk out of the theater feeling it in their chest plate. They want them to say, perhaps for reasons they cannot consciously fathom, to everyone they know: You have to see it. Really.

You do. Not because it's grim, not because it's depressing, or even scary. The Road is all of those things, both acutely and chronically. But there was not a single stupid choice made in turning this book into this movie. No wrongheaded lyric tribute to the novel. No moment engineered simply to make you jump.

The terror of it is in a normal world made vacant. There is a surprising terror in a landscape of farmhouses full of possessions that have no function, a remarkable danger in a pile of old hammers, in the possibility of forgetting what things were once for. It's a fear worth feeling. And there is something knotty and resilient, eternal and elemental, something worth caring about in all this, in a parent's love for a child, especially when love is the only thing left in the world that has the least little thread of purpose.

That's their world, bleak and empty as it might be. Ours, too.

The Road opens this fall.

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The road ending explained: what happens to the boy.

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The Road:5 Differences Between The Movie And The Book (& 5 Things The Movie Got Right)

10 realistic apocalypse movies that will keep you up at night, the 10 darkest "end of the world" depictions in post-apocalyptic movies.

The Road ending is as bleak as the rest of the movie, with the father dying slowly from a wound as his son watches.
The Boy may find salvation in the ending when a family offers to take him in, but their intentions are ambiguous.
Both the book and the movie of The Road are dark, but the book's horrors are even more unpalatable for the screen.

The Road ending is just as bleak as the rest of the post-apocalyptic drama. Director John Hillcoat adapted Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road in 2009. 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. 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 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 . By The Road ending, the pair finally arrive at the coast. However, the man is shot in the leg with an arrow by a paranoid survivor. He kills his assailant, but slowly succumbs to his wound and a worrying cough he’s been plagued with as his son watches him die.

It's rare for an acclaimed book to be translated into a film note for note. That almost happened in the case of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Almost.

The Road Has A Deliberately Bitter-Sweet Ending

The boy may have found salvation by the road 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 .

Some have a much darker interpretation of this potentially hopeful ending for The Road movie.

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.

There are many scary apocalypse movies involving big monsters and adverse weather events, but ones with a touch of realism are often the scariest.

The Road Movie Is Bleak But Has Nothing On The Book

Cormac mccarthy's story is much worse.

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.

The death of Viggo Mortensen's character was borderline unwatchable in the movie, but it's even sadder in the book's ending.

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. The death of Viggo Mortensen's character 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.

End of the world movies are often unsettling, but some post-apocalyptic films like The Matrix depict futures that are especially dark.

The Meaning Of The Road Ending

The finale of the movie is either uplifting or nihilistic.

The Road ending is undeniably bleak. However, the entire movie is one with a lot of depth, and there's clear thematic meaning behind the the journey the Man and the Boy take, as well as the Boy being found on the beach after watching his father pass away. A key theme of The Road is loss. The Man is tormented throughout by visions of his wife, and how she took her own life. Even in the harsh and unrelenting world the Man and the Boy now inhabit, losing her still plagues the Man's mind.

With the death of his wife, the Man's personal world has collapsed, and the same is then true for the Boy once the Man dies at the end.

This is also true of the Boy, though f or Kodi Smit-Mcphee's character , the loss is of his father during the ending of The Road. Despite the Boy's pleading, the Man ultimately passes away due to his wounds and a possible infection. For the first time in the movie, the Boy is truly alone, his emotional state mirroring the mostly-empty post-apocalyptic world around him. It's not just the wider world that's gone for the Man and the Boy. With the death of his wife, the Man's personal world has collapsed, and the same is then true for the Boy once the Man dies at the end.

Then, of course, there is the question of the meaning behind the family finding the Boy in the final scenes of The Road ending. The meaning of this moment can be read in two different ways, depending on what the viewer thinks happens next. If they take the pessimistic view, that the family have bad intentions for the Boy, then this moment could be said to thematically represent that there's always something left to lose — an incredibly bleak message for an equally bleak movie.

Ultimately, due to the ambiguous nature of the film, the meaning of The Road ending is down to interpretation

However, should the viewer interpret the ending of The Road more optimistically, then the deeper meaning behind the family finding the Boy could be that it's possible to find reasons to hope even in the darkest of times. Ultimately, due to the ambiguous nature of the film, the meaning of The Road ending is down to interpretation, but there's no doubt it leaves viewers with much to process and mull over by the time the credits roll.

*Availability in US

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Based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, The Road centers on a father and son who attempt to make it to the coast after a global apocalypse wipes out all plant and animal life on Earth. The Road was directed by John Hillcoat and stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

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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

Paula Mae Schwartz Steve Schwartz Nick Wechsler

Writer Writer

Joe Penhall

Original Writer Original Writer

Cormac McCarthy

Casting Casting

Francine Maisler Katie Shenot Lauren Grey Lori Lewis

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

Special Effects Special Effects

David Fletcher

Visual Effects Visual Effects

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

Stunts Stunts

Composers composers.

Nick Cave Warren Ellis

Sound Sound

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

Costume Design Costume Design

Margot Wilson

Makeup Makeup

Toni G Sherri Simmons

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Enzo Angileri Jennifer Santiago Geordie Sheffer

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
Theatrical R-12
Premiere BFI London Film Festival
Physical 15 DVD
Premiere Mill Valley Film Festival
Theatrical R

111 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

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 ★★★★ 12

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 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 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 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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A view over countryside leading down to a bay, with hills visible on a distant coastline.

The Coast Road by Alan Murrin review – love and the limitations placed on women

The author’s accomplished debut boasts beautifully nuanced characterisation in its compassionate study of small-town life

A lan Murrin’s assured debut is about the claustrophobia and cruelties of small town life. Set in County Donegal in 1994, when divorce was still illegal in Ireland, The Coast Road focuses on three women trapped by marriage.

Colette Crowley, a bohemian poet, left her husband, Shaun, and three sons after an affair with a married man in Dublin. At the start of the novel, she returns home, the relationship over, but Shaun refuses to let her visit their youngest child, who is still at school. She rents the Mullen family’s rundown cottage on the desolate coast road and tries to make ends meet by running creative writing workshops. Downtrodden Dolores Mullen is pregnant with her fourth child, while her philandering husband, Donal, watches their new neighbour with a predator’s eyes.

Colette strikes up a friendship with Izzy Keaveney, who has her own problems with her controlling politician husband, James. Colette enlists Izzy’s help to see her child. But when Shaun finds out, his vindictive response affects them all.

Murrin’s novel is immaculately crafted, his characterisation beautifully nuanced. It’s a world the Irish-born author clearly knows well and he gets under the skin of his three female characters, their disappointments and vulnerability. The men are bullies, while fear of scandal keeps the women in check. Father Brian, Izzy’s confidant and one of the few likable male characters, is treated with suspicion by James. As Izzy observes: “You can’t even be friends with a priest but they think you’re sleeping with him.”

Gossip damages reputations and intimacy, but Murrin’s scrutiny of the community’s prejudice is shot through with humour. After the town butcher, Michael Breslin, makes his way to Colette’s house one drunken evening, the incident is pored over, with Colette cast as the scarlet woman. Izzy admonishes one local for her naivety: “You believe … Colette let that obese eejit climb up on top of her?”

Murrin writes perceptively about love, desire and the limitations placed on women. While the denouement is melodramatic, this is a compelling, compassionate page-turner.

The Observer

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The Road movie review & film summary (2009)
Advertisement. "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.
The Road
The Road (2009) The Road (2009) The Road (2009) View more photos Movie Info. Synopsis America is a grim, gray shadow of itself after a catastrophe. A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi ...
The Road (2009 film)
The Road is a 2009 American post-apocalyptic survival film directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy.The film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.. The film received a limited release in North American cinemas from November 25, 2009, and was released in United ...
The Road (2009)
The Road: Directed by John Hillcoat. With Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce. In a dangerous post-apocalyptic world, an ailing father defends his son as they slowly travel to the sea.
The Road review
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 ...
The Road (2009)
The atmosphere of The Road is bleak and suitably depressing. The film provides some thrills and chills but they are few and far between. It loses steam about two thirds of the way through, where I lost concern for the safety of the characters. It's not bad, but a long shot from Mortensen's usual. The Road gets a B-.
The Road
Ali Gray TheShiznit.co.uk. The Road is a highly emotional, involving, palm-sweatingly tense movie that will scar you for life if you let it. Exhausting to watch but oddly exhilirating to ...
The Road
A film adaptation of the novel, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall, opened in theatres on November 25, 2009. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as the man and Kodi ... Disrupted Natural Revelation & the Journey toward God in Cormac McCarthy's The Road". The Internet Review of Science Fiction. VII (2). Archived from the original on ...
The Road
Based on Cormac McCarthy's beloved, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen leads an all-star cast in the big screen adaptation of The Road, the epic post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. (The ...
The Road Review
Posted: Nov 24, 2009 6:55 pm. Based on Cormac McCarthy's award-winning novel, The Road offers a non-stylized look at a post-apocalyptic future through the eyes of a father and son struggling to ...
The Road
Movie Review "The clocked stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions." That's all we ever learn of the apocalypse that has decimated creation in The Road.Only a remnant of roving, ravaged—and ravaging—survivors remains to scavenge in the ruins of humanity.
The Road (2009) Movie Review from Eye for Film
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 ...
The Road (2009)
In a dangerous post-apocalyptic world, an ailing father defends his son as they slowly travel to the sea. It's a post-apocalyptic world, several years after whatever the cataclysmic event, which has in turn caused frequent quakes as further potential hazards. The world is gray and getting quickly grayer as more and more things die off.
The Road Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 19 ): Kids say ( 16 ): The Road is a well-made movie and a powerful story. But despite the characters' persistent hope, the relentlessly grim material -- including the constant, cold, gray visuals -- can be overwhelming, somewhat stalling the drama's forward momentum. Indeed, it's hard to argue that Hillcoat's intense ...
Movie Review: The Road (2009)
In the end, The Road is both a depressing study of human nature pushed to the limit and a heartwarming testament to the unwavering bond between father and son. It is a film I highly recommend. Critical Movie Critic Rating: 4. Movie Review: Robin Hood (2010) Movie review of The Road (2009) by The Critical Movie Critics.
The Road (2009)
The clocks stopped at 1:17. The Road is directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and written by Joe Penhall (Enduring Love). Based on the 2006 novel of the same name by American author Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men), the film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Road (2009) Movie Reviews
The Road (2009) Critic Reviews and Ratings Powered by Rotten Tomatoes Rate Movie. Close Audience Score. The percentage of users who made a verified movie ticket purchase and rated this 3.5 stars or higher. Learn more. Review Submitted. GOT IT. Offers SEE ALL OFFERS. SEE KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES IN IMAX image link ...
The Road (2009) Movie Review
A very down to earth and heartfelt story. Definitely worth the watch if you're willing to feel like you've been punched in the gut. 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.
Film Review: The Road (2009)
The Road is hard, perilous, a cautionary tale to world leaders that toy with the notion of armageddon and setting off a nuke to teach another nation a lesson or to respect a border. When the end ...
The Road Movie Review
It's always cloudy. Everything is dead. There is no color left in anything — not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. Ruined, wrecked, used up — it is our world, consumed at ...
The Road Ending Explained: What Happens To The Boy
The Road ending is just as bleak as the rest of the post-apocalyptic drama. Director John Hillcoat adapted Cormac McCarthy's book The Road in 2009. 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.
The Road (2009)
My review of the post apocalyptic drama The Road(2009) starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, and Michael K....
‎The Road (2009) directed by John Hillcoat • Reviews, film
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. 111 mins More at IMDb TMDb.
The Coast Road by Alan Murrin review
A lan Murrin's assured debut is about the claustrophobia and cruelties of small town life. Set in County Donegal in 1994, when divorce was still illegal in Ireland, The Coast Road focuses on ...

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