Hacker Cinema
The Road
2009 · Film · 111 min
Directed by John Hillcoat
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. Their destination is the warmer south, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there.
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45 comments on Hacker News
Less deep history, but a similar looking tunnel in Pennsylvania - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandoned_Pennsylvania_Turnpike . The most interesting thing about it is probably that it was used to film The Road.
They make for nice conversions to bike paths and hiking trails at least?
FWIW, I've seen every one of Tarantino's films since "Reservoir Dogs".
I may give "The Road" a chance though.
I just watched "The Road" yesterday night.
Good movie.
I hope, at least, you managed to watch the films before you had an opinion on them. Tarantino's, I mean.
The Road is not a violent or pessimistic book, tho there is violence and pessimism in it. Don't confuse the set and the setting.
Why write about, 'the worst among us'? Some art (and Cormac tottered over the line between wrought and overwrought plenty) is about finding meaning in the margins, in the edge cases. The statistical noise at the outerbands of anything might make it an impossible endeavor for meaning-making, but that's why art. You try anyway. Some writers are skilled enough to make the mundane sing and that's great, but McCarthy obviously didn't seem to care for that approach.
I think I can see why Child of God put you off enough for the thoughts of others to prevent any further effort, but I'd suggest you give him another go.
I'd save blood meridian for later tho; If you don't get too distracted by the setting of the road, it's a perfectly optimistic book.
As the poet said, something in us does not erode (free pun!)
Goerge RR Martin did not and could not tell his stories in a 90 minute mass market movie. People are ignoring the limits of the medium. Limited to 90-120 minutes of all inclusive storytelling, must keep mass market audiences attention the continuous 90-120 minutes. Must have a payoff to the audience.
'The Road' changed things up. Technically good story telling, good movie craft. I would never watch it or another movie like it again. I felt like crap for a week after. Much success in being different and eliciting feelings, horrible at being entertainment (to me at least).
Mad Max, obviously, Night of the Comet, The Quiet Earth, A boy and his dog. I think the early 80s was a good time for the genre.
Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and that other Charleton Heston movie with zombies that I can’t remember (not a huge fan of zombies)
The Road is a fairly recent movie that fits.
British TV had Space 1999, lots of early Doctor Who and an attempt at the Tripods series by John Christopher. By far my favorite was “Survivors” written by Terry Nation - who needs zombies when you’ve got actual problems to deal with!
Thank you.
For what it's worth, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here. Different authors have different writing styles, and different readers have their own preferences.
For context, I was an environmental science undergrad, and we read a lot of nature writing like this with very descriptive prose. Aldo Leopold, Barbara Kingsolver, The Overstory, etc. have similar passages. Many/most of my classmates loved those kinds of books. I tried, but could not.
In particular, The Overstory is the only book I've ever (tried) to read that was recommended to me by an environmental lawyer, a college teen, an old lady, a grocery store clerk, and a cop – all in the same week or so. It clearly won a place in many people's hearts. But I couldn't read past the third or fourth chapter because it just got so long-winded with descriptions about a chestnut tree. I could see the beauty in it, but I still couldn't bring myself to finish it. (In contrast, I'm now reading a book about AI spaceships... lol. Not exactly Pulitzer material, but a fun read.)
There are other nature-adventure writers with different writing styles, like Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, etc.), who uses grade-school language to rapidly advance the plot page by page. Where setup is important, he centers nature scenes from the perspective of a person experiencing it, instead of the Haiku-like out-of-body experience found in most nature writing. I find that much more relatable, personally. Other books, like The Klamath Knot, center nature in the context of mythology juxtaposed with science, using comparisons and contrast to paint an interesting picture, rather than verbose, painterly descriptions.
It's fine if people prefer one writing style over another. I loved The Road, but watched the movie first and then read the book. I preferred the movie, personally, but the book was fine too (if depressing). He's not one of my favorite authors, but so what? I have nothing against the man.
> Does this matter?
I think it's great that there are authors with distinctive styles, even if they're not for me. It's so awesome -- and rare -- when a book can really grab someone's imagination like that, even if that someone isn't me.
I read Hyperion recently and I think it would suffer from movie treatment. Like McCarthy’s The Road, so much of the horror in Hyperion comes from what is left to the imagination, like the terror of the shrike; and that which is internal to the characters, like the pain of the cross.
I doubt these could be translated effectively to a visual medium.
I've only seen the movie, but If I remember correctly, the Road never really explains the catastrophe, nor does it link it to climate change, does it ?
Also, a cataclysm that kills bugs but spares Charlize Theron ? Come ooooon..
> I have read the book, and it is about sticking to your morals no matter how evil the world will become.
What morals? They stole other peoples stuff. They abandoned the poor people in the basement to die at the hands of the cannibals. They "helped" the guy they met on the road but that was due to childish naivety of the son. It was superficial and meaningless help. The book was entirely about amoral animalistic survival than morality. Notice how it was mostly the son who wanted to be "moral". If anything, the book is saying being moral is childish in an amoral world.
If anything, it showed the inability to stick morals. The most important "moral" of the story was the father's promise to the son and his wife, not to let the son fall into the hands of the cannibals. Throughout the book the father promises to kill them both if it came to that. In the end, the father couldn't bring himself to kill the son and left him to the cannibals who were hunting him.
In your response, you say we don't know whether the "good guys" got him or the "bad guys" did. It's obvious the "bad guys" got him. On your first reading, it isn't clear, but after subsequent readings, it is obvious there are no good guys left and the cannibals who were hunting ( or possibly other cannibals ) them got him.
> That is the message of the book.
If that was the message, the book showed how stupid and pointless it was. Not that it was a good thing. If there was a "message", it was that the mother was right and the father was wrong. But that isn't the message either.
Rather than taking the book for it is, people are trying to find a positive message to make themselves feel better. That's a childish notion. Not everything is a disney movie. Not everything has to have a happy ending or a positive message. You don't have to be uplifted or find morality in a book.
There are several doomsday movies that predate The Road, were better at the time, and hold up far better today, IMO. Children of Men (2005) would be my top suggestion. The rare movie I've gone back and watched multiple times. You know why it's good? Because the central premise didn't come true (humanity is infertile), but we live in that dystopia now anyway. It's like Black Mirror but for the police state. It didn't go into hyperbole like The Road or The Day After Tomorrow. It was a realistic, slow-motion apocalypse. Going out with a whimper instead of a bang.
However, Children of Men is admittedly not as bleak as The Road, so not a fair comparison. If you really want a film that produces bottomless despair in the viewer, I recommend Threads (1984) instead. It was produced by the BBC on a shoestring budget, and yet it's still a better film. I can't say I recommend it, but if you do watch it, the ending is on par with Requiem for a Dream for being memorable and filled with doom and horror.
The Road just wasn't very good IMO. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand? Same writer, different genre, but excellent.
As others have mentioned here, John Hillcoat (director of the film adaptation of "The Road") is taking a crack at filming the "unfilmable" "Blood Meridian".
I'm stoked to see how he handles BM, especially who he casts as Judge Holden. I feel like Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been perfect for the role, but I'm confident Hillcoat will find someone equal to the task.
My favorite Judge quote from BM:
“This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance, in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned, and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale, there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event, the history of all is not the history of each, nor indeed the sum of those histories, and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence, for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know, he might well absent himself, and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan, if plan there be.”
RIP.
Hillcoat made The Proposition, which is a very McCartyesque film in its bleakness and violence. It's a great movie, written by and scored by Nick Cave.
I thought his adaptation of The Road was fine (though maybe a book that doesn't need an adaptation), and he hasn't done anything interesting since then, in my opinion. But Blood Meridian may be better material for him.
Damn. I must have exceptionally dark taste in media, because I've definitely got a few "well, that was good, but I kinda wish I hadn't read/watched it" things in my history, and The Road wasn't even close to qualifying. I'd say the film Threads hit me harder, to pick something with similar setting and circumstances, though that's still not quite in that category.
(It Comes at Night is probably my #1 in that category for film, and I guess Watts' Blindsight in books—both messed me up for days after, the former with some depressive nihilism, the latter with days of fairly intense derealization that weren't too fun—and I'm not normally especially prone to either of those, I don't think)
The Road was the most horrifying movie I've ever watched, thanks to having kids.
Being unable to protect your children like in that movie hit all my primitive parental fears.
Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed.
If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms.
[0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem.
[1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.
Side note but I am so excited for his new books later this year. It's been so long since he wrote a new book, and statistically these are almost certain to be his final novels given his age (88).
I found the prose of Blood Meridian and The Road absolutely extraordinary, so I'm eager for more of it. I haven't read his other past novels yet, don't ask why. Maybe because I saw the movie of No Country For Old Men, and I wasn't sure if the horses trilogy would interest me.
I too read this (after putting it off for some time). It could be a bit hard going at times, but definitely worth it.
I went out and bought The Road but for some reason or another haven't yet started it (have watched the film though).
Second McCarthy’s “effective language” attribution.
I read The Road, and it was so sufficiently “effective” in its descriptions and it’s setting that I’m happy never reading another McCarthy book again. Glad I did once.
I will watch the movies though!
Almost forgot about "The Road" - The movie makes you experience the bleakness of hopelessness.
The Road (2009) is like a horror movie for fathers, really destroyed me watching it but made my more aware of how tough it is to be a father & husband.
He was an executive producer for the movie 'The Road' (a 2009 American post-apocalyptic survival film) so he at least has a passing interest in the topic.
Haha, check out the post-apoc movie "The Road".
Papa! Papa!
Papa! Papa!
Papa! Papa!
...
Papa! Papa!
...and the movie with the most realistic portrayal for a post-apocalyptic world is "The Road"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Reading this in the NYT this morning, added to other coming global disasters, it occurred to me that given there isn't a whole lot I can do, my only regret is that I won't live long enough to see the end of the movie.
Choke ourselves with CO2? Kill all the insects and the crops die off? (Maybe that was the disaster in _The Road_.) Something else even worse that we're currently fucking up, and don't even know it yet? Growing up, I thought it was going to be nuclear war, but I'm starting to think it will be not with a bang, but a whimper. But unfortunately, I can't flip to the last chapter. I just want to know how it ends. :-)
;) Surely you are talking about the Donner party [1] cannibalism incident. Coincidentally, the film The Road, which also featured cannibalism, had a short scene filmed at one of the tunnels on the closed Pennsylvania Turnpike [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_(2009_film)
The road was not a blockbuster, blockbuster video games don't translate to the same level for movies.
I love the snippets of prose I've seen from Blood Meridian and The Road, but I am reluctant to read them, even though they're well on their way to becoming classics of the English language. My impression is that the books are saturated in darkness with very little light shining through. The violence and horror will stick in my thoughts long after I put my books down. There are certainly books and movies I regret ingesting for imagery that they've embedded in the back of my mind.
Did you get that feeling reading these books?
I think what gives Threads extra psychological heft is the fact that it opens with a very long sequence of everyday life pre-bomb, which grounds the film in reality. Because the cause of the disaster is unknown, it is easier to shrug off "The Road" as an alternate universe. The events in "The Road" are more awful, but less immediate. Now that I think about it, that grounding also enhances the "Wizard of Oz", in a different way.
Oh man... I still get the ideas of "The Road" out of my head, and I saw that like 5 years ago. The only positive thing in that movie was that maybe at the end, there are some good people left.
Just being reminded that this film exists has put me in a bleak mood. It makes "The Road" look like "The Wizard of Oz".
The grimmer your story, the smaller the market. Thus even though famines are often disastrous human events that can mean the death of millions and frequently alter the course of history, hardly anyone makes movies about them because watching people starve unnecessarily is hardly anyone's idea of a good time. At least in war stories someone gets to be winner, even if it's temporary. In a famine everything gets worse and the only people likely to profit are the people who were already winning at the outset, so there isn't really a story arc.
You can do movies like this (The Road, Schindler's List, Dallas Buyer's Club, Hotel Rwanda are all good examples) but if the world of the story is crushingly awful then you're basically reduced to one plot - moral individual risks/sacrifices self to provide glimmer of hope to others. Offhand I'd say you can only put out a truly grim a-list movie about once every 5 years.
"I'll be the lone dissenter that will come out and say that The Road was an absolutely horrible movie. I found it so drawn-out, boring, interminably long."
No Country for Old Men was the movie that convinced me that Cormack McCarthy wrote overhyped garbage. I didn't even bother watching The Road, as I expected it would be just more of the same.
The film was an adaptation; The Road was originally a novel.
I think many would agree that The Road movie isn't good, which is why I highly recommend reading the book. McCarthy's unique writing style lends itself to the material in a way movies can't capture.
I must watch Threads given all the talk about it in this thread, but I guess I'll be the lone dissenter that will come out and say that The Road was an absolutely horrible movie. I found it so drawn-out, boring, interminably long. I realize it was presenting life in a post-apocalyptic future, but that's no excuse to have no plot to truly speak of in its 111 minutes of runtime.
Then again, I hated Mad Max and only sat down to watch it at the theater because of the ridiculously-good critical reviews it had amassed. I found it a pointless exercise in hedonism and a testosterone-fueled car chase filled with gore and nudity for their own sake.
no, just no. This was a terrible film. Does not compare at all to the book or film of The Road
I absolutely love "The Road", it's one of my favorite post-apocalyptic movies (I haven't read the book yet).
Just talking to someone about "Threads" yesterday. IMHO the best "after the nuclear holocaust movie" (even more so than The Road), I think of all movies it was the one with the biggest immediate psychological impact on me (a rare thing)...I remember watching it and quite simply not wanting to get out of bed the next morning as I just felt a nuclear war was inevitable, we were all screwed anyway - and humanity sucked.
Example: Movie The Road was quite true to the book, but much more viscerally horrifying. A VR "you're there" version would indeed be significantly ... less fun.
IMO, the last well-done dystopian films I saw, and I've seen a lot, were The book of Eli and The Road. I think we need more big questions being looked at in this space rather than pure entertainment pushes.
Here's a link to a list, by year, of how the future is portrayed in films. I'm not sure if it's listed in the infographic, but the film 'Code 46' (Tim Robbins) tells an intriguing story of where I see things heading.
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/3199/inforn.jpg
Another image I can't locate showed how we used to see the future, from a 1980's standpoint (think: Jetsons), and how we see it today (think: "The Road", "Book of Eli" or "I am Legend").
Well said: ...Each generation learns things and most of it is not passed on to the next generation. Every single one of my peers got squat from their parents in terms of "this is how it works, pay attention".
Blade Runner is an excellent choice for this discussion. A really good movie, something that remains with you long after. In terms of scary violence - that early tense scene where the android is being tested might be over the top - but the rest is just Star-Warsy gun battles where no one gets their head blown off...
Is it really that much more violent than prime time TV?
Lots of murky,scary suspenseful scenes.
I guess the counter argument is always - 'there will be time to watch this in the future'. But it is an individual decision not one for the esrb. Depends on the kid, I think.
On overprotection. I ran across a reference within the last year to 'free-range parenting'. Didnt read the book but got a good chuckle out of the amazon review and the idea in general.
I live in a NJ city about 1 mile west of the Empire State Bldg. So I am in the crucible of NYC-metro competitiveness which insinuates itself into everyday life. Kids taking 2 or 3 different language classes, multiple sports, music - all before they are 4 yrs old.
And insane over-protectiveness at times. A neighbor with 2 boys 9 and 7 yrs old, lets them walk 6 blocks to school. Which I somewhat agree with. Not sure I will be able to do that at the time but it has made me think about this issue in general.
The biggest problem with over-protectiveness in general is that I think kids absorb the fact that you dont trust them. In fact you are thinking of the murderers and molesters and drunk drivers but the kid thinks you dont trust him/her.
The movie/ novel "The Road" deals with this on an extreme level
I think this will inevitably happen in adolescence - some kind of "I'm old enough" / "No you're not" discussion. Seems like it is better to develop alot of trust before that happens.
I didn't know that, but saw it last night on /r/pittsburgh... I would go see The Road and eat $.20 wings tomorrow night but apparently they aren't showing it at the South Side theater.
http://iheartpgh.com/2009/11/29/5-movies-and-more/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Iheartpgh+(iheartpgh)&utm_content=Reddit
The Road really is a fantastic book, makes you think about how rapidly humanity would change if civilization dissolved. Can't wait for the movie to come out this fall.