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First review for The Road appears online

// May 14th, 2009 // fun

“The Road is the most important movie of the year.”

That’s what Esquire is saying in their review of The Road, one of the very few I’ve seen anywhere. The film was supposed to come out late last year, but now it’s set for October.

Only I don’t think there are bad reasons why it was delayed. It just wasn’t ready yet.

Mark my words…this film will likely be up for Best Picture and maybe win it. That’s just the feeling I’m getting about it. The Academy loves these kinds of films.

Most of you know I read the book a few years ago and raved about it. The story was so…bleak, dark, depressing and yet spellbinding and hopeful. It was so good and meaningful, it earned author Cormac McCarthy a Pulitzer.

So when it was announced there was a movie adaptation on the way, and that Viggo Mortensen would play the lead, I was super-excited.

Now people are finally seeing it and from the four-page Esquire review that you can read by clicking here, it’s going to be a film you don’t want to miss.

The quickie plot of the book/film is a near-future, post-apocalyptic world in which a father and son try to find food and stay alive, despite the barren, dead and bleak landscape, and other surviving humans who turn to cannibalism.

In the book, the father and son are never even given names.

Here’s a little excerpt from the review:

It isn’t a vision of the future at all. This is a vision of the end. Like: In the end, there’s only one can of Coke. Coke is about to be forgotten. In a collapsing mall, the father digs a single can out of a toppled vending machine. It falls to the floor like a weighty and singular apple. The father opens it and offers it to the boy as a treat. The boy drinks and insists that the father have some, too. They are like that: generous and genuine, even with the last details of a time the boy has never known. But the father gives almost all of it to his son, who stops for a moment, then asks, “Because it’s the only one I’ll ever have, right?” In that moment, he realizes not only what he has lost, but why his father wants him to have the soda at all. You can see he likes the Coke, too.

Even with Star Trek, Transformers, and all the other movies that are coming out, or have already come out this year…The Road is the one film I’d see if I could choose only one.

Check out the rest of the review!