The Road

Drew's Thoughts:
The simultaneously best and worst thing about the big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road is that it reminds you what a great book the novel is. Though it does so mainly by being a version of The Road from the alternate universe where everything good actually sucks.
For the most part, they got visual look of the film down pretty well. Everything is varying shades of grey, landscapes are desolate but not barren etc. Unfortunately, they don't have any other aspects down very well at all. Despite getting the look technically right, the film doesn't create any atmosphere whatsoever. The film opens with idyllic life, before the whathaveyou devastated everything, where Viggo has a mustache and horses and Charlize is pregnant and not on suicide watch; then it shows you when the whathaveyou devastates everything which was a really dumb choice. The story is about the man and his son not the man and his wife yet the boy doesn't get introduced until a little while later. In general, there's way too much Charlize Theron in the film anyway. And the kid is twice as old as he should be. And Viggo Mortensen is not a very good actor and doesn't do much to persuade me otherwise with this film. And moreover they don't really have much of a father/son chemistry, Viggo keeps telling me how much he loves the boy but I don't really feel it...
And the film falls into disappointing Hollywood conventions throughout, such as when "exciting" things happen thunderous music and quick editing are cued (there shouldn't have been any music in the first place.) And even despite that, the film still moves at a leaden pace. Most egregious of all though, is the film takes the book's enigmatic dialogue and makes it cheesy as hell, with the poor performances stripping away its thought-provoking nuances.
It's incredibly disappointing coming from John Hillcoat, whose first film The Proposition is very good and especially because this project had a lot of potential. McCarthy's works are very easy to adapt; the way he writes is easily filmable. No Country for Old Men turned out well, for instance. All a director really needs to do is figure out which parts to cut out and then put what's on the page onto the screen. He or she doesn't need to and should not write more scenes for Charlize Theron.
Up to this point, I've always wondered what the unnamed catastrophe in the novel actually was and now it seems like this film could very possibly be the disaster in question.