a review of 末日危途

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT THIRTY-TWO: We're past our required 31 movies now, but as I'm including Cinemonster's three bonus "extra-credit" films (plus a last-minute addition that I made when I thought I wasn't going to get to see GDT's FRANKENSTEIN before November) we'll be going all the way to 35 films by Halloween. Buckle in, because the next couple days are gonna be a whirlwind. John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic fable THE ROAD has been on my watchlist since it was released, and I guess it's taken this long for me to find myself in the proper headspace to really be able to sit down and consider its take on the end of civilization and humanity. I read McCarthy's novel in a single sitting lying on a hammock sometime after it won the Pulitzer in the mid-2000s, and its stark images and prose have stayed with me ever since. And as much as I admired Hillcoat (his gritty Aussie western THE PROPOSITION is an all-timer) as well as Viggo Mortensen's ability to channel both sadness and strength across multiple roles, part of me wondered if it seeing those images rendered in live action would just be too much to bear. And I'm sad to say that yeah, it kind of was? I will give the movie credit for sticking to McCarthy's grim tone without softening any of what happens over the story's slowly unspooled, highly episodic narrative. But whereas McCarthy's use of spare descriptions and unpunctuated dialogue gave the book's melancholy a sense of ghostly impressionism, the grounded realism of a live-action film makes some of the images almost too horrific to dwell upon. I admire this film a lot for what it does to adapt the book, but it's one that I found hard to sit through at times, in spite of its ultimate optimism about humanity's chances in the face of utter annihilation. (Additional note: If you're planning to stream this one, be aware that the Fawesome channel's free ad-supported version has something very wrong with its audio track. I went through the first 10 minutes wondering why every line of onscreen spoken dialogue was muted before realizing that it wasn't a weird stylistic choice. I was able to rent a properly-presented version for just a couple bucks on Fandango but it led to a few minutes wasted trying to figure out the issue.)