Remember back in high school, when you’d skirt having to read the book by watching the movie instead, and your teacher would admonish you for not getting the most out of the experience? I never fully grasped what that meant until watching The Road, a new feature film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning survival epic. Though dedicated to realizing McCarthy’s scope of a ruined, uninhabitable planet and is a pleasant enough watch, the film ultimately can’t translate the book’s introspective vision and humanistic totality. Sometimes, it’s better sticking with

the 1,000 words. Complete ScriptPhD.com review under the “continue reading” jump.

Review: The Road
ScriptPhD Grade: B

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular claculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.
-Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The Road is not a pick-me-upper by any means. Raw in its bleakness, unforgiving in its brutality, it is a lugubrious tale of a nameless father and son’s journey across a ghostly post-apocalyptic landscape devastated by an indeterminate holocaust. Knowing they won’t survive another winter in their current habitat, and with only each other, their memories, and a shopping cart of possessions to rely on, the two “carry the fire” along a road, both literal and existential, down the coast towards the Southern shore. Dying of starvation, yet refusing to give in to the cannibalism and savagery around them, the boy and his father, referring to themselves as “the good guys”, battle ungodly conditions, filth, an onslaught of “bad guys”, and their own demons in search of some kind of freedom and hope amidst a scorched earth. While minimizing some of the more barbaric imagery within the novel (a human infant roasting on a spit, tunnels piled high with human carcasses, mummies everywhere), the film adaptation, starring Viggo Mortensen as The Man and Kodi Smit-McPhee as The Boy, is no less dreary. If anything, The Road on screen seems to bypass the few glimmers offered in the novel for a road that goes on forever and leads to nowhere.

Director John Hillcoat and his team of art directors used masterful lighting and set design to evoke the omnipresent grays and ashen hues of the book. The landscapes of Oregon and Pennsylvania, with fires raging, dilapidated old grocery stores and highways, blackened tree stumps, become a living character of the film. Screenwriter Joe Penhall wisely crafts the film’s narrative directly from McCarthy’s sparse dialogue (mostly word for word) and voice overs of critical plot points. While Mortensen turns in an average performance and does what he can with the given material, Smit-McPhee’s precocious portrayal of The Boy as his father’s moral center is easily the film’s highlight. Charlize Theron’s role as the deceased mother, told retroactively in flashbacks, is somewhat plumped up from bare mentions in the book. In most ways, the film is a perfectly fine, by-the-numbers retelling of the story. So what’s missing in this interpretation? Spirituality and most importantly, hope.

Presenting a classic good versus evil fable, The Road is littered with Biblical imagery, symbolic and direct. The boy bathing in a waterfall takes on the feel of a baptism of sorts. Serpents burning alive are “no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.” The boy himself embodies a Christ-like figure in the book, a corporeal symbol of a second coming for humanity. His hair is a “golden chalice, good to house a god.” His prophetic dreams, a major driver of the journey and foreshadowing of his father’s death, are not featured in the film. An encounter on the road with a blind old man, Ely (in the Old Testament, Elijah is a harbinger of the Messiah’s second coming) is a critical point in the story. In the book, when the old man suggests that “there is no God and we are his prophets,” the father offers his son as a god. In the film, the old man (a barely recognizable Robert Duvall) feels presented as a plot device to highlight the boy’s inherent goodness, but no more than that. Likewise, in the wake of such overwhelming tragedy, the book manages to elicit unlikely moments of hopefulness that just didn’t translate in this gloomy adaptation. A flare gun used to kill a desperate thief is also presented in the book as a greeting to God or whoever is left. While rummaging for supplies on an abandoned ship, a preserved brass sextant appears as a glimmer of beauty, of the possible. With such gorgeous visual possibilities, and deft imagery to paint an impossibly devastated world, it would have been nice for the final image of the book—fish swimming in a stream—to leave moviegoers with a similarly uplifting note.

In 2008, The UK Guardian named Cormac McCarthy one of 50 People Who Could Save the Planet, calling The Road “the most important environmental book ever.” (One could make a case for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.) The film will undoubtedly also be toted in such laudatory fashion as a paragon of environmental heed. To do so is to misrepresent this story’s true intent. In a recent, candid interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cormac McCarthy was asked whether director John Hillcoat pressed him on the exact cause of the apocalypse. Said McCarthy: “A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who’ve gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.”

Ultimately, the production and writing team behind The Road put in a valiant effort to extrapolate the book’s staples to a largely faithful, if rote, film adaptation, but failed to elevate to the same depth and hints of beauty in despair. How can you transpose the soul of McCarthy’s exposition—an exposition so rich in imagery and spiritual context, so universal in theme, so profound in meaning—to a direct visual medium?

A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hagmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

You can’t.

View an exclusive Apple featurette on the making of The Road here.

Trailer:

The Road is out in theatres nationwide on Wednesday, November 25, 2010.

~*ScriptPhD*~
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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and pop culture. Follow us on Twitter and our Facebook fan page. Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.

The Roland Emmerich Sci-Fi Terrestrial Destruction Tour continues. Not satisfied with immolating the White House by alien visitors in Independence Day or icing over Earth in post-global warming catastrophe in The Day After Tomorrow, the audacious director goes for cataclysmic broke with 2012, a bona fide disaster epic. Light on solid science, heavy on jaw-dropping special effects, the eradication of humanity and its habitation never felt so visually scintillating. ScriptPhD.com review and science discussion, under the “continue reading” jump.

REVIEW: 2012
ScriptPhD.com Grade: A-

Let’s get something clear right off of the bat. Whatever you may or may not have heard, 2012 is a good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster romp. Oh, sure, there’s a perfunctory plot, and some scientific jargon interspersed here and there to give the whole thing an official air (about which we’ll have more to say later), but above all else, there is action. Heaps of spellbinding, impossible action. A countdown of sorts spirals the film into its opening credits. In 2009, in an underground physics laboratory in India, abnormal neutrino masses are detected from inexplicable solar eruptions, leading to a dire conclusion. The ominous warning is delivered to the White House by geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in a star turn). In 2010, the protests and religious zealotry begin. In 2011, preparations around the world commence for impending doom amidst strong reassurance from political leaders that everything is fine. And in 2012, the word comes to an end.

In the middle of all this mayhem are some familiar Roland Emmerich archetypes. There is the well-meaning, avuncular President (Danny Glover). There is the Everyman Hero, novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), who is just trying to get his estranged family back but reluctantly saves the world in the process. There is the unscrupulous power broker, in this case science advisor to the President Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt). There is even an evil Russian oligarch, Curtis’s boss. On a camping trip in Yellowstone with his children, Curtis encounters the eccentric radio conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson, in a hilarious movie-stealing role), who insists that the rapidly increasing temperatures and global earthquakes are leading to demise, and that the government is killing off any naysayers who try to issue warnings. Furthermore, Charlie claims to have secret maps in his camper to secret Chinese vessels being built to house the remaining survivors. Only when he encounters the U.S. military and Helmsley does Curtis get an inkling that Frost may be right about everything (he is)—just in time to rescue his children, ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her chump of a boyfriend Gordon (Tom McCarthy). After narrowly escaping a decimating 10.0 earthquake in Los Angeles, the family drives to Yellowstone, where Gordon, who has had two flight lessons, is tasked with flying the clan across the world to China. Turns out that Curtis’s Russian boss bought the several-billion Euro passes aboard the modern ark, so the family somehow manages to arrive by a combination of cargo plane, Bentley and Himalayan pickup truck. From here, the movie becomes nothing more than a race to navigate the ship under the arrogant guidance of self-appointed President Anheuser amid a series of mechanical breakdowns, last-minute portentous scientific recalculation, and heartfelt emotional revelations. Is all of this recycled, predictable and formulaic? Heck, yes! Is there ever a shred of doubt that the Curtis family will be reunited and what’s left of humanity will reach its safe harbor? Heck, no! But by the time your heart rate returns to resting state, it will be too late to realize that you’ve been duped.

Plot, acting, and pacing, normally the linchpins of a movie, are in this case incidental and superseded by the Oscar-worthy special effects and CGI. The Earth does not just destruct in 2012, it does so in high definition, with every painstaking detail preserved by a team of digital effects supervisors. According to an interview in the New York Times, a room of supercomputers worked for 16 months to render proper shadows from the sun on every surface and infuse realism in the fault cracks, tsunamis, fires and other demolitions in each frame. And it works. Individual cars and humans can be seen falling from collapsing skyscrapers and crunching freeways and bridges. Every pixel of crumbling ground and droplet of raging water show through on the big screen. During one particular heart-pounding car chase, in which Jackson Curtis navigates his family to safety as Los Angeles literally drops off beneath them, I realized that I’d forgotten to breathe. That was the beginning of the movie. By the time Rio de Janeiro, New York, Rome, Washington, DC, and even Hawaii disappear, all you can do is sit back, hold on to your arm rests and enjoy the ride. Take a look at this exclusive video from Sony Pictures that shows how special effects artists turned Yellowstone into a supervolcano:

There have been a lot of naysayers and negative reviews decrying everything from the propriety of showing such wanton destruction on a wide scale to the grandiose special effects (over-the-top was used) to the flimsy pseudo-science used as a plot basis. I can’t legitimately argue against a single one of these points except to say this: who cares? On the sliding scale of sensational movie escapism, 2012 ranks off the charts. If a roomful of professional movie critics could erupt in spontaneous applause over car chases and airplane maneuvers, perhaps the rest of us, too, can set aside our cynicism for two and a half hours and be dazzled by the movie magic of it all. Oh, and, by the way. If there’s a struggling creative writer in your life, be nice to them. They just might save all of humanity one day.

2012 goes into wide release Friday, November 13, 2009 at theatres nationwide.

Trailer:

Now for the bad news. The “science” on which 2012 is based? Bunk. To be fair, a whole host of documentaries and programs centered around the Mayan prediction fallacy have or are set to air, including Ancient Code: the Movie, SyFy Channel’s 2012: Startling New Secrets, 2012: An Awakening, and the riveting 2012: Mayan Prophesy and The Shift of the Ages. And so on, and so forth. Wikipedia has an excellent archive of references to 2012 in fiction. But what did the Mayans actually say and where did this harebrained idea come about?

Mayan stargazers observed and recorded astrological planetary motion in cycles of 26,000 years, dated back to a mythological “creation” date. The large overarching cycle is then broken down into five lesser cycles of 5,125 years each, known as their own creation or world age. We are currently in the fifth or final creation cycle that corresponds in the Gregorian Calendar to August 11, 3114 BC—December 21, 20012. This calendar is known as the Mesoamerican, or Long Count, Calendar. In Long Count, the initial date of entry into the fifth world was demarcated as 13.0.0.0.0. Each cycle was said to have been ushered into a new one by destructive forces of one of the elements: Jaguar, Wind, Rain, Water or Earth. The fifth cycle, according to the Mayans, is said to be ruled by Earth, which in the Aztec and Mayan languages can translate to anything from movement, shift, evolution, earthquake, navigation, synchronicity, clue tracking, or turtle. Yes, you read that right—our planet could be destroyed by either an earthquake or a turtle. One can certainly understand harboring a soupçon of skepticism about things getting lost in translation!

Dr. David Stuart, a world-renowned expert of Mesoamerican Art at the University of Texas at Austin, has written a comprehensive and worthwhile Q&A blog post about 2012. Worthy of note are the following two questions:

What did the Maya say about 2012?
They actually said very little, if anything. Only one ancient inscription refers to the upcoming 13.0.0.0.0 date in 2012, from a now destroyed site named Tortuguero. The question we scholars have struggled with is whether the final few hieroglyphs of that text describe anything about what will happen. A few years ago I put forward a very tentative and incomplete reading of these damaged glyphs, including a possible use of a verb meaning “descend” and a name of a god, Bolon Yokte’. Much of it was iffy and remains so; I’m not sure I believe much of what I wrote back then. More recently my colleague Steve Houston has pointed out the glyphs may not even pertain to that date anyway. So there’s considerable ambiguity just in the reading of the glyphs and the rhetorical structure of the Tortuguero passage. What we can say with confidence is that the ancient Maya left no clear or definite record about 2012 and its significance. There is certainly no ancient claim that the world or any part of it will come to an end.

Who came up with this crazy idea?
New Age hacks and, now, Hollywood producers. The idea can be traced largely back to the novelist and mystic named Frank Waters, who in the 1960s and 70s wrote a number of novels and cultural treatises on Native Americans of the American southwest, including his 1963 work, Book of the Hopi (he was not an anthropologist). One of Waters’ last works was Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth Age of Consciousness (1975), an odd pastiche of Aztec and Maya philosophies wherein he proposed that the “end” of the calendar would somehow involve a transformation of world spiritual awareness. Waters’ ideas got picked up and expanded upon by Jose Arguelles in his insanely misguided but influential book The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987). Many different writers have followed with their own strange books and essays on the “meaning” of 2012, mostly contradicting one another.

Harmless fun, to be sure, but on a more serious note, in an exceptional article entitled The Carnival of Bunkum, h+ Magazine writer Mark Dery decries the effect the aforementioned 2012 cultural collective will have on amplifying public hysteria as the clock slowly turns towards this most inauspicious date. Offering the case study of Daniel Pinchbeck and his ooga booga book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Dery points out that such “mysticism” exchanges those petty scientific principles of rationalism and empiricism for cultural arrogance and anthropological ignorance. Worse yet, accepting the belief that rising CO₂ levels and worsening environmental conditions are foretold by mythical or Biblical prophecies, and will end in mass apocalypse anyway, prevents us from taking imminent action to combat these anthropogenic threats in a necessary way.

So relax, people. Instead of planning for doomsday, go watch a movie about it.

~*ScriptPhD*~
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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and pop culture. Follow us on Twitter and our Facebook fan page. Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.