My Response to The Washington Post Review of The Road

This is my entire comment on her review of The Road.

"'The Road' finally resembles little more than a highfalutin' zombie movie with literary pretensions."

And...

"At its best, "The Road" offers a profound portrait of parental devotion and a child's instinctive love of mercy and justice and gratitude, but McCarthy's fatal sense of cruelty and hyperbole make the trip a bummer."

You're describing what makes it realistic. Even our world right now, at times, has a "fatal sense of cruelty." Any rational and logical person would expect that to be magnified by tens of thousands of times in a situation like the book and movie depicts. Of course it's a "bummer." It's the end of the world as we know it. It doesn't have a clean, crisp ending with a new beginning as you see in something like Roland Emmerich's Trifecta of Non-Depressing Doom; "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow" and "2012." The "happy ending" in McCarthy's "Road" is simply the fact that although the boy's father died, the boy will live on, hopefully.

You seem to be lamenting the fact that the movie didn't have this wonderful ending with blue skies and warm weather and a kiosk that sells iPods, iPhones and laptops. Here is to a realistic "disaster" movie, The New McCarthyism, it lacks the sturm und drang of Herr Emmerich but retains the flicker of humanity while showing the dregs of same.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112501106_Comments.html

The Road - Excellent Movie...

I went to see The Road yesterday. It is one of the best movies I have ever seen. I was expecting a horrible nightmare of a film, I really was. It was delayed at least three times, I stopped counting, and I figured the whole project was in deep trouble.

For those that could not make it through the book because they didn't care for McCarthy's writing style, the movie is the book come to life yet it's so different because it is a film...you will probably like the movie where you didn't like the book.