The Road

I really, really don't think this a good film. On a lot of levels. I'll detail
a few.

Plot. This goes back to my dislike of the original book. This is a novel set
post apocalypse. One day, the world burned in some mysterious way that left all
plant and animal life dead, save for some small percentage of humans who were
protected in, apparently, flimsily built American housing made of wood. For
many, misery takes over, and they turn to suicide and cannibalism. Because
that's what humanity does when we're pushed to the limit, allegedly.

So, living in the north, a man decides that he and his son won't last another
winter, and thus decide to walk south to somewhere unspecified, where it will
be warmer. Apparently, the first thing to be destroyed in the apocalypse was
the world's supply of mountain bikes, so the best that he can scavenge is a
shopping trolley to push their stuff in.

And so, they trek south in this grey and brown wilderness, like the world's
longest and most boring Quake level until the film ends to no particular
conclusion.

The plot is one of those "we're not going to tell you so don't ask" affairs
that refuses to discuss what happened, or why. We're supposed to be looking at
the characters. Which brings me to how much I hate the characters.

Not hate in the sense of "these people really irritate me." Hate in the sense
that they maddeningly make very little sense at all.

Take for example, the kid. Now, I had a reasonably middle class upbringing, and
I think the kid is soft as butter. In the film he's about ten, and was born at
the beginning of nuclear(maybe) armageddon, and is all wide eyed, and snivelly,
and fundamentally incapable of living in the world he was brought up in. He is
not, for instance, capable of listening to his father, and either a) keeping
silent or b) staying put when there are potentially cannibalistic rapists
about. If the armageddon took place *last week*, then yeah, sure, that's how a
ten year old would be. This kid... he couldn't possibly have grown up like
this. He'd be hard. He'd have instincts. But the author doesn't want to write
about that. He wants a perfect ickle angel to wax lyrical about. Despite his
insistence that everything else in the world has turned to complete shit,
apparently this kid turned out 20th Century Western Normal. He's a Nature over
Nurture man, evidently.

And there are lots of things I do not understand about the minor characters.
Like how is it that good, normal people don't trust one another, but somehow
rampaging cannibals can travel in helpful supportive packs of ten or so? The
vision of humanity's breakdown is as arbitrary and inconsistent as the nature of
the apocalypse itself.

I suppose I ought to make an effort to appreciate what the film is trying to
say, which is something or other about how parents will do anything for their
kids, which is as trite a generalisation as you'll find. But there wasn't a
single thing about the film from plot to setting to characters that made me
want to immerse myself in it at all.