The Road film discussion

The Road was a devastating dystopian film, but almost in the opposite way than the other dystopias in the other films so far; 1984 had a similar filthiness and bleakness to it, but in Tom Hillcoat's film, there is no government breathing down anyone's neck; no technological manipulations or oversight of any kind. There's a total absence of government or order at all; the terror of living in this dystopia is that or surviving moment to moment, never knowing what will happen, where not one thing is certain. We are put right away into the aftermath of some planetary catastrophe, the nature of which is never made explicit. The landscape is barren; cities and residential areas are in the same state of burnt-out devastation. The dominant colors during entire film are murky greys and blacks. As with other effectively convincing dystopias, this depiction of the future is frightening because is contains real potentials for what the future could look like. There is overwhelming evidence that there is a planetary ecological meltdown already happening; a sequence of events like the simultaneous outbreak of global war at the same time as ecological meltdown could bring human beings back into a situation of pre-Stone Age (post-Anthropocene) conditions, not far different from those shown in The Road. As in Soylent Green, if it comes to it and there are no other options, its likely human beings would end up resorting to eating other human beings instead of starving; even the kind of horrifyingly cruel cannibalism that the movie depicts. 

Cinematically, the film utilizes a great amount of different shots to create a feeling of convincing realism and effective narrative flow: using panning deep-focus long shots to capture the dreary devastated landscape. Also at times, connecting the film to it's beginning, the film uses flashbacks to tell how the boy and the man lost their mother and wife. I would say the film is far superior to a film like Children of Men, even though Children of Men has highly stylized, technologized cinematography or even an extremely detailed production design. The reason might be that Children of Men is too stylized, too postmodern in the way it depicts its dystopia. The Road gets into the ugly,  filthy, dehumanized, desperate reality of dystopia in a better way, showing the utter vulnerability and mortality of a man and his son under the most dire existential conditions. It's like in The Road, humanity is back in completely pre-civilized times; the soundtrack of the film often adds to this horror of total vulnerability; through the mourning, melancholy of the music there are often echoes of noise like faint animal calls coming through the wilderness. The man and the boy aren't given names, which adds to the depersonalized animalism of their situation; "In these times there is no room for luxury", the old man says. The desperation is at such a pitch that suicide potentially could have been the end of the characters at many different points. A terrifying implication of the film is the extremes human beings can be pushed to if the circumstances are dire enough; there are enough examples through history and daily life. We should hope society and the social contract never break down to the extreme showed in The Road.