So, films adapted from books often fail to live up to the source material. When it happens, it is a wonderful experience. Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, coming from the same Stephen King short stories collection, are a good example, Blade Runner, the adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is another. Unfortunately the list of bad adaptations is far longer than the list of the good. The Road is a book by Cormac McCarthy, and one I loved, and so I hoped that this adaptation would go well.

McCarthy writes in a very specific way, he mirrors the bleakness of the world he writes about with his prose. No words are wasted, no speech marks encircle the dialogue between characters and there is little to offer the promise of a happy ending. The film is the same.

A bleak start that continues down the bleak road, getting steadily bleaker until you realise that any light you hoped for at the end of the tunnel is only in your mind. This is an end-of-the-world movie in pretty much the way that 2012 isn’t. The world here is not one of computer-generated jollity with big explosions, and buildings falling. The only real use of CGI in this film, as the director has said, was in the removal of aeroplane contrails and birds from the sky.

You don’t see the end of the world in The Road, but you don’t need to. That’s not important. What is important is the unnamed man and his unnamed son and their journey. Not just their journey along the road, heading south, but the journey that their relationship takes. I keep using the word bleak, but that is, in all truth, the only way to describe the outlook of this film. The acts of the last remaining humans, the way nature appears to be dying, even the flashbacks and the, possibly unneeded, voice over, all have only one possible way to be described. Bleak.

There are other words to describe the film itself though. Brilliant is one, moving is another. In much the way that Up provided tears with your laughs, this provided tears with a side of tears. There are moments to be happy, but they are spread thin.

To get a performance of that nature from an actor as great as Vigo Mortensen is to be expected, he is quite simply an acting God, but when you are faced with the prospect of putting a 13 year old into the mix, problems may arise. Problems that Kodi Smit-McPhee faced head-on, and pulled out one of the best performances I have seen from a child actor for a log time. The Australian pulls of a spot-on American accent and only adds to the plausablity of the film.

This is the first film I’ve seen this year, and so is clearly my favourite so far, but it has set a good tone, and I hope this is a sign of things to come, more so than Avatar.

————————————————————————————

This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

• Previous Entry: [GamersView] #0 – Opinions wanted
• Next Entry: [Retrocity] Lode Runner