It's all apocalypse this and apocalypse that these days. 2012's coming up, and I guess deep down in our collective subconsciousness we think that maybe Tezaquatl really might come back to check in on his peeps down in central America, or whatever the Mayan calendar says is supposed to happen. (Don't look at us, T.Q. Go ask Spain where they all went.)
And so they've made a John Cusack movie where 2012's so bad that Los Angeles gets blown way up in the air and Cusack, along with all of his neuroses and snark, has to fly under it in a plane to escape. That's pretty bad, but it's going to look like The Sound of Music compared to this The Road movie that's coming out in a week or so.
It's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, just like No Country for Old Men was. I read No Country a few months back when it was again fashionable to do so for snobs like me who have a "thing" about reading a novel right after the movie comes out.
It was pretty good. I went to That Bookstore at Mountebanq Place and asked for another one of his books. Whichever one. I didn't care. They all have cowboys and horses and conflicted protagonist heroes and lovely colloquial dialogue and such, right? So I asked Maryalice and Turk to get me another one. A nice one, but not too expensive.
So it turned out to be The Road, which had a picture of a bearded and forlorn Viggo Mortensen and a little boy dressed as homeless mountaineers on the front and the little "now a major motion picture" thing at the top. Well, I thought, there don't seem to be any cowboys but maybe it won't be that bad.
It was that bad. Turns out the reason there aren't any cowboys is that they all died, horribly, along with just about everybody else. McCarthy goes ahead and points out that it's just as well that the cowboys are gone because the cows done went and gone extinct anyway. Horses? Don't even ask about the horses.
Birds, turnips, alligators, fish, trees, kittens: dead, dead, dead, dead, dead and dead. There's one dog, but it's just about to die and nobody petted it and it was probably the last one.
And corpses aplenty.
It's bleakness turned up all the way to 11. To further paraphrase Spinal Tap, it's like, "how much more bleak could this be?," and the answer is: "None. None more bleak."
The only book I've read that's bleaker was American Psycho, which is also the only book that I can think of that really should be banned and burned in piles and its author imprisoned for at least a month on general principles.
There's no sun in The Road, of course. Just lots of rain and snow which, merrily enough, falls gray instead of white because it mingles with all the ash also constantly falling everywhere. Ash, people. The word "ash" appears in the book more often than "and." Ash everwhere. Ash this and ash that and choking on ash and wading through ash and ash getting into eyes and coughing up ashy clots of blood and not a few studies on whether the characters might be better off dead than cold and wet and covered in ash all the time.
If the book went on for another hundred pages McCarthy would have had to come up with several different words to describe ash like the Eskimos do with snow.
The story revolves around a man and his young son trying to make it to the coast, where they think things might be marginally less awful. They survive via scavenged canned food and a revolver with three bullets in it. Barely. There are only a dozen or so other characters, and all but three of them are cannibals who eat children. Or worse.
McCarthy never explains what happened to the world. Maybe the asteroid, maybe the nukes, maybe Yellowstone blew up, maybe Martha Stewart was on Oprah one day talking about the benefits of combining the whitening power of bleach with the cleansing power of ammonia. (Don't do that. You'll die.)
Whatever happened, it sets a new low bar for post-apocalyptic wastelands.
Mad Max, Waterworld, Planet of the Apes, the Resident Evil movies — they're all timeshares and champaign breakfasts compared to the stuff that was in McCarthy's head when he wrote this one. It's sort of like our culture is 12-year-old McCarthy caught sipping from his bottle of Ancient Age Apocalypse Juice and he's made us drink the whole thing to teach us a lesson.
I guess it was an alright read, in its way, as a study of the bond between father and son, but why in the world would anyone want to make a movie out of it? Who would want to watch such an ugly thing for two hours?
You want to break yourself off a piece of no-excuses, full-fat, caffeinated apocalypse for this holiday movie season? Skip 2012. Here's your apocalypse and drink deeply of it. Just go ahead and choke on it.
If it's faithful to the book you'll be hoping the projector explodes 15 minutes in and puts the audience out of its misery before the real suffering starts. You'll be hoping JarJar Binks shows up, it's so bad. Maybe that's the point of it, but it'd be cheaper to burn out an anthill with gasoline and stare at the remains for a few hours.
I'm going to make sure the next Cormac McCarthy novel I buy has at least one horse on the cover. A happy-looking horse at that.
Wow ...
Just, wow.