A Detailed Script Review of The Road

Agentorange over at Quiet Earth has seen an entire 123 page version of the screenplay for The Road starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

His review has given me even more reason to be utterly thrilled to see this movie.

For those that have not read this book (and if not, you should do so now), it’s the tale of a post-apocalyptic world in which a father and son hunt for food and try to survive in a country filled with emptiness, ash and cannibalistic humans.

The book was written by the amazing Cormac McCarthy, and it had a profound impact on my life in terms of my desires to write my own novel.

You can imagine my excitement when I heard it was going to be made into a film. And the pictures so far have seemed pretty spot on with what I envisioned on those pages.

But now we have a full script review and the report is good:

To be blunt, the script is a complete stunner. It is a devastating masterwork which, I’m glad to report, has been written with absolute devotion to the original novel. If this is the script that gets filmed, then The Road will not only be the most important post-apocalyptic film ever made but it will profoundly affect the cinema going world. But I can’t help but wonder; is the world ready for a film this dark? You can read the rest of our review after the break but I must warn you; there are some minor spoilers.

According to Agentorange, everything in the book makes it to the screenplay (written by Joe Penhall), with the addition of a few extra scenes to bring narrative power to the film. Nothing has been changed, which means that people are in for a very, very dark film with hard subject matter and brutal moments of fright and sadness.

The one thing I’ve been curious ever since hearing about Charlize Theron being cast as the wife, was whether or not they were going to enhance her role just because of who she was. In the book, the wife appears only in a few flashbacks, nothing more.

Agentorange says her time up on the screen could be as little as five minutes. Wow.

That’s impressive to me at least, that Penhall didn’t feel he needed to expand that role. It was my one big fear and that’s been squashed.

When you get a chance, you should read the entire script review over at Quiet Earth and let us know what you think. But I’ll leave you with a scene from early in the movie, which should give you a good idea of what this film is going to be like.

INT. BARN- DAY

Three pairs of feet wearing different shoes- a man’s shoes, a woman’s shoes, and a child’s sneakers hang above three carefully placed chairs. The Man and The Boy barely react.

Boy: There could be something there. There could be corn or something.
Man: No, they ran out of food.
Boy: Maybe we could find some hayseed in the hayloft.

The Boy eyes the empty hayloft, goes over to the swinging CORPSES, studying them.

Man: It’s not what you think, they committed suicide.
Boy: What does that mean?
Man: You know what that means.

The Man goes outside while the boy thinks about it a moment.

EXT. FARM- DAY

The Boy Comes out and finds The Man sitting on the wheel of a dusty, faded, soot-coated red tractor.

Man: Come here, sit down a minute.

He Takes the boy onto his lap and takes out his revolver, opens the magazine and shows him there are two bullets left.

Man: You see that? Two left. One for you and one for me.

He helps cock the pistol and curls the boy’s thin index finger around the trigger.

Man:You put it in your mouth and point it up. Like this. Just like I showed you.

[Quiet Earth]