Kritiken

[W]hat The Road does better than any film I can remember is immerse the viewer in a completely realised other world, without any jolts in tone or logic to break the spell... After The Road, every other global disaster movie is going to be a picnic.

The usual complaint made of high-toned literary adaptations is that they miss the subtlety and rigour of the source novel. Not this time. Hillcoat and his production designer, Chris Kennedy, have done a bang-up job in translating McCarthy's images to the screen... Yet such fidelity merely exposes the monotonous nature of the story...

Like an orchestra conductor dampening down the ominous blasts of timpani and brass, while urging more from his emotion-twisting string section, Hillcoat has intensified the heartrending poignancy, while deflecting our attention from the horror.

Hillcoat's rendering of McCarthy's words can't be faulted for its visual replication of the author's grim picture of mankind's final days... It's Hopeless and Corpsey on The Road to Gehenna but minus Dorothy Lamour's gams and any semblance of anything approaching even grim good cheer.

John Hillcoat's "The Road" is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it a has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Director John Hillcoat, in attempting to realize McCarthy’s vision of the planet — and the fragile concept of humanity — in chaos, delves so deeply into his source material that he commits the one sin Roland Emmerich, with his dominatrix-like wielding of sensual pleasure and punishment, cannot be accused of: he loses sight of the audience.

The Road is an undifferentiated parade of horrors; you watch from between clenched hands, but each new atrocity overwrites the last, like the next room in some cruel funhouse ride. For everything the movie gets right—most notably the impressively pared-down script by Joe Penhall and the two truthful and fearless performances from Mortensen and McPhee—there’s a corresponding painful blunder.

“The Road” turns out to be good at shocking and upsetting us, but it lacks the compensating emotional heft that would make absorbing those shocks worth our while.

For everything the movie gets right—most notably the impressively pared-down script by Joe Penhall and the two truthful and fearless performances from Mortensen and McPhee—there’s a corresponding painful blunder, like the overwrought score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

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.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, Oprah-endorsed, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem—in which a father and his 10-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror—was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date, is, by contrast, a long, dull slog.

[It] honors McCarthy’s book with haunting pictures of the future’s end—the persistent thud of dead trees crashing to the ground is particularly chilling—but they tend to overwhelm the drama in the fore.