Pebble In The Shoe Of Time

The Movie:
2009 Directed by John Hillcoat. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall. A post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son trying to survive by any means possible.

I rarely pony up the asking price for recent release movies on DVD, waiting rather until the asking price drops to, say, $5 US dollars for what very few I even ever buy. However, a movie was made two years ago based on the Cormac McCarthy novel: The Road. I waited until the retail cost dropped to $16.99. Few current American authors of mainstream fiction interest me at all, but Cormac McCarthy has written what I would call worthy and worthwhile novels (Angela's Ashes, All The pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men, and, most recently, The Road.
The Road, unlike most post-apocalyptic set fiction, really has something to say. Refreshingly, it's a story about people and life. The characters are deep and complex. Just like real people are. The setting has it's horrific dynamics but without overshadowing the real story and this is a great story. I highly recommend both the novel and the movie.
The movie is rated R for violence, some disturbing images and language. Again, I usually pass on R rated movies unless it's for war scenes, not wanting to further vex my soul beyond what I must endure in everyday life but this story is noble in it's own right, perhaps justifying the exposure to raw, foul language, and so, somewhat mitigating the R rating for me.
Probably my reasons for being attracted to a story like this are not so unusual for a North-America dweller and, like many others, it turns out, I have always suspected that the USA would be removed from the world stage as a player and power somehow, (notice it's conspicuous absence from end-time prophecy in The Bible,) and wondered if a natural event like say, the Yellowstone Caldera, a huge super-volcano, were to go off in a big way and/or a subsequent, full-on nuke strike were to finish the job, etc., and if this were to happen at, say, the beginning of the 7 year tribulation period. . . . well, anyway.

I thought some of the locations in the movie, looked familiar to me and they are. Turns out, some of the film was shot in Oregon as well as stock footage from the Mt St. Helen's area after the big eruption back in 1980. Also Pennsylvania and Louisiana, where I'm guessing the scenes with mining tailings mounds along the road and the white mini-mansion with the cannibals and "livestock" in the basement, looking like typical Louisiana.

Here's a link to a movie review page for this film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/
The Novel:
The novel has the luxury of being able to provide much more detail and story content than the movie.
Here's a public domain review of the Novel:
The Road (2006)

Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.

Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind.

Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs.

The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.