Envisioned dread

Tonight we caught the cinematic version of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road. Having originally read and liked the novel back in 2008 (if "liked" is the word for such an unsparing read), I've been wondering what the "Hollywood treatment" might do to it. In short, very little. Like the book, the film is a powerful if desperately bleak vision of a shattered humanity on a dying Earth. The film makers have done the novel proud, and it remains a horrific rendition of the end of civilisation and the extinction of the future.

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In passing, it's pretty strange to have seen the film while gradually playing through the atomic holocaust of Fallout 3. It being a while since I read The Road, I thought the game had a pretty bleak setting. It now looks positively jolly.