REWIEW: The Road (Spoliers)

Having spent the last two days in the library next to my friend who was reading The Road I wasn't labouring under any misconception that an afternoon watching it would be uplifting.

Unrelentingly bleak, the feeling of fear and discomfort so brilliantly portrayed by Viggo Mortensen is conveyed to the viewer with incredible, realistic post-apocalyptic landscapes and a sense that something is always about to go wrong.

The flash backs play a key part in this too; the back story, the human element, what has been lost - home, sunlight, beauty, family.

And then this is up-ed by some brutal scenes; inner-eds of a just cannibalised man, a light less basement-come-larder full of naked mad men, an arrow pulled out of a calf, baths of blood. Harrowing. and not for the faint hearted.

But the most faint hearted of all is the child in the film who plays the other half of the central duologue (Viggo being the first). Despite having always lived in post-apocalypse America the boy cannot fend for himself at all and is not in anyway hardened to what he sees; there are several times when a dying of something resembling TB father has to carry him away from danger because he can't run, he can't fire the gun, when hiding he makes noise, and he is incapable of alerting his father to danger, again just makes noise. He seems incredibly ungrateful for what his father does;protesting when his father fires back at someone who has just shot him in the leg, getting angry when they leave places that have been safe havens because of impending danger, placing himself in harms way through trusting other people and then behaving like a spoilt brat when his father tries to protect him and themselves from it.

He represents the hope for mankind, the inherent innocence and good of humanity. Trusting; rejecting revenge, killing and selfishness. A true child. And as such he obviously couldn't fend for himself, couldn't kill, couldn't adapt; and can't be expected to.

Bollocks. It is a picture of the social construct of Western childhood placed in a world it wouldn't have survived in.

There are children all over the world who have faced hell, a subject which haunts me at the moment as I am researching a dissertation on child soldiers. The Road's presentation of childhood, this inherent goodness that stands against our bleak world and adult destruction, belittles every child who has ever adapted, and picked up a gun and learnt to fight so they don't die. They are failures because they would have helped their dad pull the cart not sulk at the back. Like "real" children.

In the film you see Mortensen loose his trust in other men, become bitter and selfish. And he doesn't survive. What does this say?

The Road, although brilliant and beautiful, condemns each one of us who see ourselves as Viggo, or even as one of the "bad guys", as lost, gone wrong, nonreturnable, in need of childlike goodness to save us. And when you're only 21 that's a pretty grim outlook. For children who live in this world and have had to go through real life apocolypses it's even worse.

Lets not have, 'as long as you're good children, you'll be ok'. Thats not fair. Its not a choice everyone has.