Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road may well be my favorite book. If not favorite, than certainly top five. Well, the trailer for The Road has been released, and... I'm even more hesitant to see this film than I was before. Despite the sparse prose in which McCarthy wrote the novel, I always had very vivid images in my head while reading. I never imagined the city scenes as the director visualizes them here. The coastal scenes, however, are exactly as I imagined them. Regardless, The Road is touted as another post-apocalyptic thriller. Seriously? There was absolutely no subtlety in that trailer, a quality that truly carried much of the novel's weight. Some of the most important communication between Father and son (in the novel) is delivered through eye-contact rather than verbal exchange, but there's a good deal of speech in the trailer. When that kid makes the comment about the can of Coca-Cola, I cringed -- it seems like somebody made a mistake in casting. And the music... great, I'm glad that the studio chose generic Hollywood thriller fare. Sure, maybe it would have been cliché or expected, but almost anything by Godspeed You Black Emperor! would have been fitting. Maybe "Dead Flag Blues" with an alternate voiceover in the beginning? The Road is a compelling tale of the bond between a father and son. It has a very elementary plot, yet it's one of the greatest pieces of literature I've read. This film looks like it will be an edge-of-your-seat thriller, and something that I will see, but am honestly worried about.
