'The Road' Movie Reviews

Manifesting novelist Cormac McCarthy's bleak post-apocalyptic vision onto the big screen is the kind of challenging task that won't please everyone.

But for the most part, critics like -- with reservations -- what director John Hillcoat has done with 'The Road,' which stars Viggo Mortensen as a father trying to teach his son how to survive -- and be civilized -- in a gray world with only a few other desperate humans left on it.

Here's what the critics are saying about 'The Road.' Manifesting novelist Cormac McCarthy's bleak post-apocalyptic vision onto the big screen is the kind of challenging task that won't please everyone.

But for the most part, critics like -- with reservations -- what director John Hillcoat has done with 'The Road,' which stars Viggo Mortensen as a father trying to teach his son how to survive -- and be civilized -- in a gray world with only a few other desperate humans left on it.

Here's what the critics are saying about 'The Road.'

Entertainment Weekly: "Yet 'The Road,' for all its vivid desolation, remains a curiously unmoving experience -- or maybe not so curious, given that nothing really happens in it. In the novel, McCarthy played off postapocalyptic Hollywood thrillers, and so he gave you the heady feeling that you were seeing a movie unfold on the page. Yet he brought off that feat without much action; the backdrop was grand, the emotions interior and refined. That's a problem when 'The Road' is done as a movie: It's like a zombie thriller drowning in tastefully severe art-house gloom. "

The Hollywood Reporter: "In 'The Road,' director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America. Shot through with a bleak intensity and pessimism that offers little hope for a better tomorrow, the film is more suitable to critical appreciation than to attracting huge audiences though topliners Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron will attract initial business."

Variety: "This 'Road' leads nowhere. If you're going to adapt a book like Cormac McCarthy's 2006 bestseller, you're pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it's not worth doing -- first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people's while to sit through something so grim. Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front."

The New York Times: "The most arresting aspect of 'The Road' is just how fully the filmmakers have realized this bleak, blighted landscape of a modern society reduced to savagery. A grimy, damp fog hangs over everything, and instead of birdsong there is the eerie creak and crash of falling trees. Vehicles sit abandoned on highways, houses stand looted and vacant, and what used to be towns are afterimages of violence and wreckage."
Chicago Tribune: "Director John Hillcoat's film version, scripted by playwright Joe Penhall, constitutes an act of faithful adaptation. Yet its faithfulness is more to the letter than the spirit, and it's not the work of an inspired director, merely a dogged one. The script and the imagery take the story in some peculiar directions in the name of 'relatability' and, odd as it sounds, sentimentality. The best thing about the film is Viggo Mortensen's performance."

Miami Harold: "The first thing you notice is that there's too much music. Nick Cave's intrusive score feels pushy and overstated -- the opposite of the eerie silence Cormac McCarthy achieved in the hushed pages of his novel about a father and son wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland."

The Associated Press: "In Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel 'The Road,' no word is repeated so often and with such steady emphasis as'ash.' The stuff is everywhere. It clogs the air, blocking the sun. It blankets the ground. But in director John Hillcoat's adaptation of McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, there's not even a cigarette's worth. Soot-deficiency is a forgivable offense, but Hillcoat's 'The Road' is missing other things, too. Though the film mostly strives to stay close to the book, it fails to translate its essence and somehow feels more dreary than it should -- which is saying something for a story about the apocalypse.

The Boston Globe: "The Road'' has been poured straight from McCarthy's bleak bottle and brought to the screen by Australian John Hillcoat, who turned the 2005 Outback Western 'The Proposition' into an epic of blasted landscapes and bloody motivations. He's the man for the job, yet in adapting this harsh, unyielding book for the screen, Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall pull their punches the slightest degree and thus too much.