I Finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and the movie. Spoilers probably.
The book:
Nice simple story of a man misguidedly clinging to life for the sake of his son. The story is well written with the writing style matching the subject matter. The story takes place after the collapse of the world, nothing outside of a debilitated human population is left alive. The book is about struggle without real hope, a father teaching his son to survive in a world without a future. Basically I read the last 200 pages waiting for a murder suicide, so I got a little bored with this one. Aside from that the minimal amount of dialogue in this story is strong, and the relationship between father and son is eerily realistic and relatable. Props to McCarthy.
The movie (actual spoilers here):
Immediately after reading the book I threw the movie on and throughout was nodding saying to myself “yeah, okay, that’s not exactly right but the essence is there.” That was before father and son found a fucking beetle on the side of the road! Jesus! Why!? That’s an abuse on the level of not killing Rambo at the end of First Blood. It’s on the level of not having Stella go back to her abusive husband at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire. It would be as if at the end of Waterworld they found out they were just on a great lake. It’d be like finding out that Darth Vader was just kidding about being Luke’s dad. It’d be like dying, going to the gates of eternity, coming face to face with the omnipotent, and it asks for your social security number. It’d be like having a personal tutor teach you Mandarin for seven years and then find out you’ve been learning some bullshit noises that don’t mean anything to anyone but that tutor who ends up being an internet sensation having a youtube channel dedicated to this ongoing joke of teaching you nonsense. It’s piss. You can’t just add that to the movie version of the story! You find a beetle where no other life exists? What’s the implication here? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a twelve-year cicada, so is the movie hinting that life can start getting back to normal? Maybe they should have seen a wild herd of fucking dinosaurs, if they’re gonna throw the story in the shitter they may as well show me some goddamn super reptiles or something. I hope someone who has seen this movie can be like: “Jake, relax, it was a cicada, it wasn’t supposed to be super important, the cicadas will die eventually and the story will get back to where it needs to be.”
I'm not sure how he successfully lights shit up like this...
Another issue with movie:
The movie makes the father look super insane when in the book he’s very practical and thoughtful. In the movie the father kicks a starving, soon to be eaten, man in the face so he can lock him back into the cellar for the cannibals, why? In the book they don’t save the cannibal food but that’s cause their locked up and the cannibals come home, they don’t actively keep the food people locked up.
"Oh magosh! Papa! I slept while someone took all our stuff while I was sleeping, except the gun and a blanket!"
Also:
At the end of both the book and the movie a family finds the kid and takes him in. At the end of the book they explain they had been following the kid and his father and it’s kind of assumed they started following towards the end when his father was getting real ill. In the movie it’s implied that they’ve been following them since the bunker, so for most of the story. Why doesn’t this make sense? What was the following family eating while the father and son consumed everything in their path?
In summation:
Boooo
"Someone stole my shoes and shot me in the leg with a bow'n'arrow, I will carry my well rested son until we find this thief!"
I gotta watch some Deep Space Nine to cool down.
Answer to your question Emma: I took a fieldtrip for school when I was like 9 or 10 and we learned about the origins of French fur trapping in Minnesota.
