“The Road” is not the Yellow Brick

September 11, 2008

Kodi Smit-McPhee on the set of “The Road,” an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, in which he plays the son to Viggo Mortensen’s father. “The Road” is not the Yellow Brick Road — it’s a must-see movie about the future of humankind!

by Dan Bloom

NEW YORK (RUSHPRNEWS) 09/11/2008–Cormac McCarthy wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a spare, but deeply touching book about the imagined aftermath of a comet strike on Earth in the future. And now John Hillcoat is preparing the final post-production work on “The Road” — a real road movie if ever there was one!

The film opens in November, just after the U.S. presidential elections. What timing! Hillcoat has called his movie “a thrilling evocation of human endurance in the far distant future”. The movie, and the book, too, weigh “hopelessness against faith,” as one critic has noted.

From the screenplay by Joen Penhall: “In the burnt, barren landscape, through swirls of soft ash and smoggy air the MAN appears dressed as if homeless, a filthy old parka with the hood up, a knapsack on his back, pushing a rusted shopping cart with a bicycle mirror clamped to the handle and a blue tarp now covering its load. The little BOY, similarly dressed with a knapsack on his back, shuffles through the ash at his side.”

This movie will become one of the most important movies Hollywood ever made, and will join Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as another urgent wake-up call to humankind. We are facing not a comet strike, of course, but the real threat of climate change and global warming, and while “The Road” is not about climate change or global warming per se, use your imagination. Connect the dots. We may all travel down “The Road” in the far distant future, not because of some Armageddon-like comet strike sending up a huge, poisonous dustcloud around the Earth, but rather because of the very possible results of climate change and global warming. And it won’t be a pretty picture.
It won’t be Hollywood in technicolor. It won’t be the Academy Awards on party night. It will be terrible.

Of course, we all hope it never comes to that. We all hope McCarthy’s novel and Hillcoat’s movie will never mirror the future, but if nothing else, the theme and the story are food for thought. Starring You Know Who and You Know Who Else, “The Road” promises to deliver the goods, and moviegoers will surely walk out of the theaters in a terrible funk, almost in a trance. But it will be a funk and trance for a purpose: to sound the alarm, to wake people up about the very real dangers not so much of a comet strike but of global warming. We have 100 years, 200 years, maybe 500 years to sort things out.

It all begins with “The Road”. McCarthy, in middle age, says he wrote the novel for his young son, not even ten years old yet. Let’s hope the message gets across and resonates worldwide. Not to sell movie tickets or turn the movie into a Hollywood blockbuster or even to garner a few awards on Oscar night, but rather to bring home a very important message about hopeless and faith and action. We have been warned, we are being warned every day.

What will YOU do to fight climate change before it’s too late?

release date: November 26, 2008
North America wide release
Nick Wechsler Productions
Early previews in New York City: November 6, 2008
PHOTO, still photo

Rating: NR
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit McPhee, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Michael Kenneth Williams

About the author: Dan Bloom is a Rush PR News political and environmental news columnist/reporter and a freelance writer from Boston, who has been based in Asia since 1991. He graduated from Tufts University in 1971 and has worked in media, public relations and education in several countries. He is currently doing research on climate change and global warming as the founder of the Polar Cities Research Institute. His email is: danbloom@RushPRnews.com

About the author: Dan Bloom is a RushPRnews political and environmental news columnist/reporter and a freelance writer from Boston, who has been based in Asia since 1991. He graduated from Tufts University in 1971 and has worked in media, public relations and education in several countries. He is currently doing research on climate change and global warming as the founder of the Polar Cities Research Institute. Write him at danbloom@RushPRnews.com

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Comments

One Response to ““The Road” is not the Yellow Brick”

Erik on September 22nd, 2008 12:28 pm

“The Road” is not didactic drivel about global warming, but apparently you enjoy stretching any cautionary tale to preach an environmental message.

The novel is far better than how limp and preachy you just made it seem. Also, it’s not a commit that ends the world, it’s never overtly stated in specifics. You’d of course know this, if you actually read it.

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