the road

During my lazy, bed-based yesterday I watched my latest DVD rental, which was The Road.

The Road is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, who was the guy who wrote No Country for Old Men. And to be frank, it has some quite similar elements, while at the same time being radically different.

One of the things that marked old men as being something a bit different was that it didn't really follow narrative conventions. Not wanting to spoil it, that basically means that the later part of the film doesn't really do what you'd expect it to do.

In a way, the road is a half-way house. There are some parts to it that aren't quite what you'd expect, but others do follow more traditional narrative paths.

Let me go back a bit. The road is at heart a post-apocalyptic road movie. However, what it focuses on is two characters - 'the man' and 'the boy' (they're never named - indeed, nobody is) almost to the exclusion of everything else. So, we never really find out what the apocalypse was, or what caused it and indeed we barely even glimpse what happens.

This of course is in stark contrast to most every other post-apocalyptic film, in that we would normally tend to focus on the spectacle of the disaster itself, rather than what happens afterwards. There is one very notable exception here - the Mad Max films.

The mad max films are pretty much post-disaster (from memory) and they also have strong elements of what you might call unusual narrative. And to be frank, the road does tread a fine line of being on the verge of being similar and simply exploring similar themes.

The biggest difference is that the mad max films are primarily action-oriented, where the road is more of a dark thriller.

I'm skirting around points here a bit, because it's really difficult to avoid spoilers. I don't want to really give away anything about the film, as I think it would rob it of its impact. And it is a film with some serious impact. The performances are remarkable, the presentation is very fitting and the whole thing hangs together very well.

If I was to make one criticism it would be that everything is a bit dark (I mean that in the sense that it's physically dark, rather than dark in tone, although it is quite dark in tone as well). This is obviously deliberate, but it can make things more than a bit difficult to see - I actually ended up turning the brightness up.

But then if that's the extent of my criticism I think you can tell I really quite liked it. Certainly I think I preferred it to no country.