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Language: eng
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Aliette was shortlisted for the John W Campbell Award for Best Newcomer at the Hugos last year, and her short fiction continues to attract accolades the world over. Her first novel - Servant of the Underworld - is published this month by Angry Robot in the UK and Australia and later in the year in the US and Canada.

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REVIEWS

The Road

reviewed by richard whittaker Directed by John Hillcoat, written by Cormac McCarthy and Joe Penhall

Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Michael K. Williams, Robert Duvall

It’s a little trite to say that such-and-such a book or so-and-so a novelist is unfilmable. When a film maker of the right caliber tries to take such a work and put their own imprimatur on such a work, sometimes something truly astonishing emerges. How would cinema be without Blade Runner, or LA Confidential, or the genre-bending genius of Adaptation? Arguably, poorer. Cormac McCarthy was placed into

that “unfilmable” category after the long, bloody and unsuccessful transition of All The Pretty Horses to the screen, but after the Coen brother knocked the ball out of the park with 2007’s No Country For Old Men, Hollywood has been dragging the waters of his back catalog. First out of the starter’s gate is his 2006 postapocalyptic Pulitzer-winner The Road and, while far from unfilmable, it arguably deserves a better film than this.

It is undeniably a courageous film. After the unforgiveable mauling Hollywood handed to poor, undeserving I Am Legend in 2007, everyone should be expecting another high-budget, low-intellect debacle. However, The Road never flinches from its core idea, that the end of the world will be a horrific place. Something unknown and indescribable has happened to the Earth. The sky is ashen and grey, the small plants and all animals are dead, the trees are following them, and humanity is reduced to a scavenger race that is quickly turning to cannibalism. A nameless father (Mortensen) and his son (SmitMcPhee) are tracking down America’s Appalachian Trail, heading towards the coast in search of the last warmth. Plagued by dreams of the boy’s mother (Theron, seen only in flashback) and roaming bands of marauders, they are the anti-Mad Maxes. There’s no speeding across the plains here, no metal boomerangs or gyroscope captains. Pushing a shopping cart full of their last few possessions, the only bullets they have are for their suicide pact if life gets much worse – preferably before the rapists and the carnivores catch them.

So, cheerful holiday fare, then.

Director Hillcoat should have been the man to wrangle this film to the screen perfectly. After all, he’s twice wrestled Nick Cave’s opaque prose into celluloid, with 1988’s Ghosts … of the Civil Dead and 2005’s remarkable Outback drama The Proposition. However, he and McCarthy seem ill-served by Joe Penhall’s script. A go-to writer for converting highly-praised novels into scripts, including Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm and his widely-panned adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, here Penhall gives the audience very little to hang on to. Part of the problem is that his script is punishingly episodic.

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