The Road - Review

The Road is, in essence, about two mentally challenged humanoids looking for the fastest way to die on the road. Normal human watching this would feel their intelligence being drained as the movies goes along.

There are a few good points. The depiction of the end of the world looks quite real. For example, resorting to cannibalism, when food gets really scarce, is very accurate. History has showed us that many times.

However, the bad points overwhelm the good ones.

What's the point of walking down the road? Walking down the main road may be faster to reach their imagined destination but it's also faster to encounter cannibals who apparently have both guns and cars. A little geophysics would teach them that if the cloud has blocked sun, it’s not necessarily warmer down south. This point may be debatable, but the next point is not. No sane person, except for when they are from Hollywood, would go on a trip with nothing to defend themselves or no food to sustain the trip while with cannibals roaming around. That's suicidal.

The portrait of the two main characters is NOT correct unless they are mentally challenged because anybody, even he or she has no idea how to survive, after the first few weeks or so on the road and if not dead, would pick up really quickly. Things like how to make weapons (No bullets? Human ingenuity should have helped them to develop other weapons such as bows and spears), how not to travel without enough food or protection, how to avoid the main road, how to be quiet and invisible, and how NOT to idiotically abandon the underground bunker full of food and supplies.

However, it is conceivable that they have already exhausted their local resource. It's a die-die situation if they don't go on this trip. Even so, it should have been planed way ahead of time BEFORE they had exhausted their local resource so that they could use some of the local resource (food, water and weapons) to support their expedition. Human is a kind of animal that knows how to plan, learn, and MAKE TOOLS.

The proper way to do this is NOT to take a long trip but many short ones, frog leaping forward. For example, he goes from location B to C, then leave the kid to guard the supplies while he goes back to B to move the rest of supplies to C. The key is that one must always make sure he has adequate supplies to his livelihood. When guarding the supplies, don't stay with the supplies! Hide them, then hide himself somewhere else but close enough so that he can watch the supplies from a distance.

Those, who don’t know how to plan or learn, don't survive any longer than a few weeks to a few months. One starving day would have taught them very quickly even if they are a little slow at the beginning.

Only in Hollywood human can live off SPAM. Feeding on SPAM only helps in the interim, a few weeks maybe. Without vitamins and other nutrition etc, the body would rot. This happened in Louis and Clark Expedition.

Finally, the two pushing a shopping cart is really laughable. Its wheels would fall off after a mile on the bumpy road.