Salon.com > The Road

Has the apocalypse gone the way of vampires?

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

SCIENCE FICTION HAS gone apocalyptic over the last fifteen years in ways unseen in previous generations. I’m talking about American science fiction in particular, because, save for maybe the Japanese—whose techno-horror productions like Akira and NG Evangelion are pretty much responsible for rewriting my brain’s comfort-code—nobody does paranoia better than us. Yes, Americans have been tasting the terminal in genre since the Cold War, for obvious reasons, including fear of nuclear fallout, political takeover, terrorism, immigration, disease, overpopulation, your quotidian laundry list of modern dreads, really. But not since the nineteen fifties have we gone so goddamned mad for Armageddon, to the point where literary agents are calling for a decrease in post-apocalyptic submissions, and four out of every six movie trailers begins with some part of Manhattan or Los Angeles being torn the fuck apart. Deep pulsating bass rumbles through the theater. BaBOOM—the bowels loosen. Mechanical tentacle beast eviscerates Time Warner Center. From the Dark Knight Rises to The Road (the book, not the movie, because why? Really.), we find gritty ruin encroaching on civil society, steadily increasing its output year by year, either directly preceding doom or setting the scene in doom’s scorched aftermath. Our entertainment industry is snowballing extermination to the point where I imagine another decade down the line every film made in America will obliterate earth in the opening credits. Just to get it over with.

On “The Road” with John Hillcoat

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000

John Hillcoat spent many years honing his craft with music videos and struggling to get feature projects launched. So his emergence in 2006 with the stylish, startling and violent Aussie western "The Proposition" -- scripted by singer-songwriter Nick Cave, an old friend and current neighbor -- wasn't as sudden as it appeared to be. (It was actually his third feature.) That film's depiction of a memorably harsh environment brought Hillcoat to the attention of producer Nick Wechsler, who was planning an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic father-son parable, "The Road."

Hillcoat's resulting film (scripted by British playwright Joe Penhall) has already been touted this year as an Oscar contender, which is remarkable when you consider that its characters have no names and its color scheme -- a few momentary digressions aside -- features steely gray, dark gray and pale gray. Indeed, the sun-baked 19th-century outback of "The Proposition" is like a summer garden party on the Seine compared to the world of "The Road," which has been devastated by an unexplained nuclear or environmental catastrophe that has killed off nearly all life, plunged the planet into endless winter and reduced human society to pure atavism.

“The Road”: Post-apocalypse now

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

John Hillcoat's "The Road" is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it a has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy. Viggo Mortensen plays a father -- he is referred to only as the Man -- wandering a post-apocalyptic world with his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee). This is a world in which the unthinkable has happened, although it's never specified exactly what the unthinkable is: All we see are the effects. All animals have apparently died, and plant life is on the way out, too. Cities and towns lay abandoned and crumbled. And the roads, once so carefully built by man as the connective tissue of civilization, are now trolled by marauding redneck cannibals who have lost every vestige of humanity. In "The Road" the Man isn't just teaching his son how to survive, foraging for food and the like, but teaching him to preserve the very things that make him -- that make us -- human.