Hope amid the apocalypse - Military Movies - Military Times

Hope amid the apocalypse

A man walks through a flower garden outside a large farmhouse on a gorgeous spring day. He strokes the muzzle of his horse as his pretty young wife looks on. It’s a bucolic scene of serenity in what seems to be a very good life.

Then the man’s eyes pop open in a gaunt, dirt-streaked face. He lies in a filthy sleeping bag in a small grotto, trying to reorient from that vivid dream-memory.

The camera pulls back to show just how distant that memory has become. Around him is a gray landscape of scarred and twisted trees, barren hillsides and gently falling ash. It’s cold, and getting colder, the sun blotted out by thick clouds that drop toxic rain as the world slowly dies.

He’s adrift in the aftermath of an apparently global cataclysm — the details of which are never explained, and don’t matter anyway — that has put humanity up against the ropes, leaving behind nothing but blasted-out buildings, derelict vehicles, collapsed bridges, vanishing food stocks and dwindling numbers of desperate, hollow-eyed survivors.

And beside him, still sleeping, is his only reason to live — his young son.

As far as holiday flicks go, “The Road” isn’t your typical feel-good heartwarmer. But you’d expect nothing else from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose world view has always leaned heavily toward the dark, cold and bleak.

There’s plenty of that here, ranging from dangerous encounters with roving gangs of near-feral men to the unspoken terror of cannibalism amid intensifying starvation.

At first, the possibility that such a film could, in the end, leave you feeling uplifted seems absurd. Yet this exploration of the steely bonds between father and son does just that, and does it brilliantly.

Much of the credit goes to the great, underrated Viggo Mortensen as the man and young Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy (we never learn the characters’ real names). Both are Oscar-worthy, particularly Smit-McPhee, who flashes a poised, note-perfect mix of toughness, bravado, innocence and vulnerability.

The cast — with such stars as Charlize Theron and Robert Duvall in supporting roles — is well served by screenwriter Joe Penhall, a Brit, and director John Hillcoat, an Australian, who avoid the showy excess of most American directors to stay true to the story’s stark vibe.

Pushing a rusty cart holding their meager possessions, armed only with an old pistol and three rounds — one of which the man keeps in reserve if he is forced to spare the boy from a fate worse than death — they are slowly heading toward “the coast,” for no other reason than to maintain some sense of purpose.

When they finally reach their destination, the film delivers one of its most searing scenes, when a ragged drifter (Michael Kenneth Williams) attempts to steal their meager cache of goods.

The man catches him and can’t refrain from meting out humiliating retribution, even as he recognizes that his actions signal the vestiges of his humanity slipping away. It’s the boy — the hopeful, nameless future — who pulls him back.

Clearly, there can be no “happy” ending for this story. Yet in the film’s final scene, something unexpected does emerge from the ashes — the thinnest filament of hope that even in the darkest of times, the indomitable human spirit will find a way to survive.

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Rated R for violence, disturbing images and language.