The Road Movie Review–The First Ever Post-Apocalyptic Chick Flick
All right, folks, we got a real winner for you today! In fact, you can call it an early Christmas present, because it’s in really limited release, so not very many people have access to this bad boy.
Today we’re talking about The Road, and it’s one of those movies that should probably have been better, but was still good.
In The Road, we deal with a Man and his Boy–seriously, these are the characters names, The Man and The Boy–as they make their way south toward the coast following a disaster of such impossible scale that it’s rendered all vegetation dead. Not a leaf or a blade of grass appears to have survived, and it’s in this horror that our duo is moving toward their admittedly rather ephemeral goal of “the coast”.
On their way, they’ll run afoul of cannibals and thieves as they scavenge the incredibly depressingly rendered rubble for food and occasionally have unpleasant memories about their past.
It’s hard to get behind a movie like The Road because of its incredible implausibility. Seriously, no human weapon can cause this kind of devastation on this grandiose a scale. There’s not one green thing left alive anywhere in this movie and frankly I wonder how they haven’t all SUFFOCATED from lack of oxygen. No trees, no plants, no crops. They make it very clear they’re surviving on random crap or as cannibals throughout the movie SEVERAL times, so how are they BREATHING?
And worse yet, it’s not one of those survival kind of post-apocalypse movies, this is one of those where we wander around and get all maudlin about the past and the “crapsack world” (thank you once again TV Tropes) that we now inhabit. Seriously, it’s like they don’t even really care about surviving–they just figure if they get to this magical fairyland called “the coast” all will be WELL. Never mind the fact that they literally stumble onto several months’ supply of food at one point and abandon it because, one night, they HEARD A DOG OUTSIDE.
Nothing good can happen to anyone in this movie because the movie will not permit it to happen, and that’s why I call it the first ever post-apocalyptic chick flick. Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, once described men as “pleasure seekers and discomfort avoiders” while women were the exact opposite. Thus, according to him, sad movies were perfect for women because it allowed them to feel bad.
That’s what The Road will do. It will make you feel BAD. For almost two hours, it will make you feel bad. It doesn’t offer the over the top action thrills of a Mad Max installment, nor the frightening plausibility of The Trigger Effect.
What it does is it just makes you suffer. And if you’re into that sort of thing you’re going to love this. Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale, which recognizes how well put together this is but also realizes that as dystopian fare this still fails miserably, gives it a six out of ten.
See this with someone you love, assuming they’re a closet masochist.
How are they breating? Well- for one- if every plant in the world were to die tomorrow there would be enough air on the planet to sustain all 6 bllion of us for 1000 years. Obviously though- there wouldn’t be 6 billion of us for longer.
And clearly the movie is suggesting a natural cataclysm- like a super volcano or meteor strike- an extinction level type of event- that has occurred several times in the past and nearly whipped out life on earth.
The movie is not “Implausible” at all- just unlikely. But the Earth has seen such extinction level events before- three times in fact.
I agree, I think the cause of the devastation is a super volcano. The movie is very plausible when you consider the level of devastation that would be caused in America if the super volcano at Yellow Stone Nation Park erupted. Also in the movie, there seems to be something that looks like white ash this is covering the ground. The closer they get the coast, the less white ash you see, which is what you probably what you would see if Yellow Stone erupted.