Warning: Probable spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.
Around a year and a half ago, I was listening to the radio, and heard about the newest book in Oprah’s book club. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but when I later heard that The Road was a post-apocalyptic story, I got more interested and picked up a copy. It quickly became one of my favorite books of all time.
Later, I was fooling around on the good old Internet Movie Database, and somehow or other managed to discover that there was a tentative movie version of The Road in the offing, but since the sum total of the information available at the time didn’t admit more than the fact that it was indeed going to be a movie, I didn’t really pay attention.
Today, a friend of mine called me up out of the blue to tell me that he’d seen a copy of the book in a store and that the cover apparently came from the movie, and I got interested. Lo and behold, there are now (probable spoilers ahead) pictures! As it turns out, the film is actually slated for release in 2009.
From what I can tell, it looks like the movie’s gone to some pretty great lengths to maintain the book’s haunting apocalyptic atmosphere, but I’ve learned to be very wary of the movie versions of really good books. Right off the top of my head, I can think of a few ways it would be easy to screw the whole thing up:
- Mess up the atmosphere: Like I said, it doesn’t look like that’s what’s happened, but who can tell from still pictures?
- Leave out important parts: I hate it when movie adaptations do this, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anything cuttable in The Road.
- Fiddle with the characters: Cormac McCarthy already got them right, and I’m hoping they didn’t mess that up.
- Make it all actiony: I don’t think there’s too much of a chance of this, but if they put in any unnecessary action, the whole thing would be ruined.
- Change the ending: It should be pretty obvious to any reader of the book that The Road is not the kind of book that has a happy ending, and if the filmmakers shoehorned one in, I will find them and poke out their eyes.
In spite of my little bulleted list of negativity there, I have very high hopes for the movie. Cormac McCarthy’s rich descriptive style and subtle characterization should make for a fantastic movie, as long as it’s done right. Watch for my review in 2009!
