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. 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.Īfter 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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