Movie: The Road

Forget about "2012". If there is only one end-of-the-world-family-survival movie you are going to watch this season, it will be "The Road". (Compared to it, "2012" is like a family trip to Disneyland.) However, it's not for the light-hearted. It is dark, bleak, and you will feel you are walking through hell with the protagonists (a father and son). It shares some common theme with 2007's "The Children of Men", but the view here is much more pessimistic. While in "The Children of Men", a new born baby was treated as the hope of the dying world, in "The Road", children are cattle to be slaughtered.

The whole movie was shot with minimal colors. Dark brown, grey, yellow, and black comprise most of the color palette like a late Goya painting. Some of the scenes were shot in places I had visited (e.g. the high rise bridge where the father and son slept in a trunk was on the way to Mount St Helens), which made it even more realistic, and haunting.

(Warning, spoiler below)
Surprisingly, the ending, compared to another McCarthy adaptation, "No Country for Old Men", seems optimistic. While "No Country for Old Men" ends with Tommy Lee Jones's mumble-jumbo monologue, "The Road" ends with the boy meeting a new family. It seems, to McCarthy, though there is no country for old men, the fire is carried, even in hell.

P.S. The "glorious" tone of the trailer doesn't match the movie at all. I wonder if the editor of the trailer had ever watched the whole movie.