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Here's a few interesting comments from All Sci-Fi member Phantom.


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The Road (2009)



Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee portray a father and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalypse movie that is as bleak and unrelenting as Threads. The boy, who was born soon after the catastrophe, knows only the frigid, barren landscape surrounding the road that they have chosen in a never ending search for food.

Viggo Mortensen’s minimalist acting is the perfect cover for a man who, while bone weary and frightened, is intensely driven to the protection of his son. The loving relationship between them is occasionally interrupted by a disagreement, but the break is only temporary. Mortensen and Smit-Magee work extremely well together. There is never a moment when you don’t believe they are absolutely devoted to each other.

Kodi Smit-McPhee delivers a remarkable performance that is as natural and unforced as childhood, itself. As the beneficiary of a dead world, his perspective on the vanished life that was so common to his father can only be experienced when he infrequently comes into contact with the decaying remnants of the past. A dusty deer head trophy on the wall of a house they are exploring is a mystery for a boy who has never seen a living animal. His first sip from a can of coke is like an electric charge to someone who has lived on a basic diet of scraps collected from the rubble of civilization. Swimming with his father in clear, clean water at the base of a waterfall becomes a moment of uncontained joy. Bodies hanging from the ceiling of a deserted house are only of passing interest to a child who has never known the comradeship of family, neighbors or other children.

The Road is one of the darkest movies in the science fiction genre. Nuclear winter has set in, probably forever. Scenes of desolation are lit only by savage images of destruction.








At night, the man is tortured by dreams of his beautiful wife who, unable to cope with the new reality, walked away to “die in the dark.” After so much gloom, the sudden introduction of a full color palette to illustrate his lost world is like a shot of Technicolor lightning through your senses.



The most harrowing episode in the movie is the discovery of a basement in which a family of cannibals has imprisoned their potential victuals. The family returns before they can escape the house. To spare his son the horror of ending up in the cellar, he prepares to shoot the boy with the only remaining bullet in his gun.





After the boy is nearly killed in an encounter with a band of heavily armed thugs, his father attempts to explain the difference between good people whom they can trust and bad people who only want to do them harm.

“Are we the good people?” the boy asks in all innocence.
“Yes,” the man responds. “We’re the good people.”

And that is it. There are no philosophers in this movie. No one suddenly breaks into a flowery monologue with a long diatribe on the nature of mankind, good vs. evil, God and The Devil. Their very existence has been reduced to a single absolute, the moment by moment search for sustenance. There is no time for introspection and self-pity. Carpe diem because there may not be another.

“There is a fire inside us,” the father tells him, "that is the essence of our survival."

But when the boy attempts to put that to the test by helping an old man (an unrecognizable Robert Duval) they meet on the road, the father rejects compassion as a weakness that could get them killed.



At the end of the road is the sea. Then what?



Despite all that has gone before, the child finds a living beetle in the sand and, a few moments later, a bird is seen soaring in the sky. Are these the dying remnants of past Earth or the beginning of new life on future Earth? The movie does not answer that question.

I don’t totally buy the last scene in the movie. While it leaves us with faint hope, it is a bit too cavalry to the rescue.





The Road is not for everyone. Its incessant pessimism is a heavy load to carry for an audience. If we are to find any meaning in so desolate a movie, it is in the humanity of a father and son who, because of the fire within them, would not and could not surrender themselves to the devastation around them.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)