Based on a Pulitzer winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road is about a Man (40) and his Boy ( traveling through a post-apocalyptic America.

There are two timelines weaved together - the flashbacks, where we meet the Wife and experience the protagonists' life right before the apocalypse, and present time, as the father-son duo walks the barren landscape. The retrospections are rather pointless - they hold no information about the characters that can't be garnered from their plight on the road but also move forward to a conclusion that can be seen from miles away.

The meat of the script on the other hand is a series of vignettes showing the burnt down world and the relations between the Man and the Boy. Now, in case you were wondering, these are the actual names - the intent is obvious and the characters indeed come off as personified archetypes. That spawns a problem, though, which is that the relationship never really develops. It fluctuates a bit thorough (there's a bit of mistrust in parts), but doesn't change in a major way, even at the end.

One could argue that another major character is the road itself. I will say it's the main. This is a very stark, very grim vision, where food is scarce, temperature low and a common flu could kill you. There's no place for the Mad Max fantasy here and very little hope to be found. It's brutal, unflinching and frighteningly convincing. And yes, for those of you who have read the book - that fireplace scene is in.

One thing that is both terrifying and refreshing about The Road is that there's almost no plot. Just like the book, the script by Joe Penhall (dated 09.11.07) is all character, a series of scenes that could be rearranged in any order with an ending that mostly just happens, as opposed to being the consequence of the journey that preceded it. What the novel has, however, is its prose, which obviously doesn't come through in the screenplay. Whether the film manages to match that depends on the work by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, the music by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave as well as the performances by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

This is the kind of script that would be lambasted in a movie class for the reasons mentioned above. As an adaptation, perhaps it's too much of a slave to the source material. Almost every scene from the book remains intact, although I would challenge Penhall's judgment on the rare occasions he changed things. One, a pivotal flashback is gone replaced by a few more scenes with the Wife that don't really add anything (except screen time for Charlize Theron). Two, to his credit, Penhall tries tying the ending into one of the incidents that transpire on the road earlier, though in that subtle edit, he (not entirely consciously, I believe) also alters the message. In the novel, the climax feels earned, not through any particular action, but in a karmic way. Here, by simply combining two characters, the author makes the father and son move away from the  resolution, which frankly - as opposed to the book - makes the Man a bit of an asshole for following his beliefs and the road.

This is not a bad script, but by the virtue of being a technical document, feels a little like cliff notes for the book. Judged on its own, The Road is a curiosity, a rebel of a script with no structure, little character development and pacing that is all over the map. What saves it, however, is that it was never SUPPOSED to be about plot twists and revelations. As it stands, Joe Penhall's script is an adequate but ultimately impotent springboard for a cinematic postcard from the glum future.