Well, it was better than trying to portay the cannabalism in the movie.

I’ve just returned from watching The Road, a film based on the Pulitzer prize-winning author’s novel of the same name. After finishing the 300 page book just under a fortnight ago, I was content to slump comfortably into my seat in the sparsely attended 6:30pm evening screening.

I knew the end of the world was coming

Since my formative years included the early 1980s, I was deeply affected by what I perceived as the reality of impending nuclear warfare. Long before SCUD missiles rained down iridescent over Kuwait City and later Iraq, I remember sitting on my back porch step on summer evenings, waiting for the Intercontinental Ballistic missile to smash my tadpole and stamp collection to smithereens. I was certain that the world would end during my teenage years. I sat through The Day After, Testament and War Games; three films that helped convince me I wouldn’t need to worry about dying of old age.

As it turned out, untrustworthy, warmongering governments have somehow managed to keep humanity from inducing its own end, long enough for the cinematic cycle to turn full circle. The camp ridiculousness of cinematographic fecal discharge such as The Day after Tomorrow and 2012 (maybe the most disappointing movie ever), has done nothing to educate any of us about the fragility of our existence.

A planet that can no longer sustain life

The Road is brilliant. No government in conflict, no statesmen posturing, no overly dramatic build up to a nuclear holocaust. The narrative simply starts post-apocalypse, and whatever did cause the end of civilisation, well, it wasn’t the concern of the movie.

Instead, it’s a tale of survival in a ash-laden, grey-streaked world of seared landscapes and charred industrial ruin. It’s Children of Men without the hope to carry you through. I could taste the filth of the polluted atmosphere, the falling specks of ash, the grime of unwashed human wreckage. The Road contains minimal action but loads of despair. What McCarthy imagines we become post-apocalypse is what we are already on our way to being. Inhuman. In a world without resources, we begin to consume ourselves.

Unlike the publicist who write the blurb on McCarthy’s book, I wasn’t ‘sustained by the love’ between the father and son. I just feel like my deepest teenage fears have come back to haunt me again.