Response to “The Road”

In our class for our final, we watched the Movie “The Road” after reading the novel in class. Most of the times a film version of a book is either a hit or miss with the audience. A lot of times readers think the film spoils the image they had created in their mind while reading, but other times the film will exceed your expectations and be very good. In this essay I will explain whether or not I liked the film, what parts I thought were very similar to the book, and which parts helped me understand the story more clearly. First of all, I liked the film version of “The Road” a lot better than I liked the novel. The film was much easier to follow. While reading the book, I found it hard to follow along because of the unique writing style that McCarthy used. This style made it hard for me to focus, and made me become easily distracted. The film version, however, was much better. It was filmed in a traditional manner, which made it much easier to follow along. The main difference I saw was the language usage. In the novel, the man and the boy talked in weird, abrupt sentences. This was one of the main reasons it was hard to follow. In the film, they spoke in more normal English, and that made it easier to follow along, and kept my attention better than the book did. The film also did a very good job of showing the action sequences. While the film could have been filmed in a boring manner, they did a good job of bringing the story to life and producing an interesting viewing experience. There were several parts of the film that were closely related to the book. I thought the film did a very good job of keeping in touch with the novel to make sure it was an authentic movie. For the most part, I thought that the entire movie was very similar to the book, but two parts really stood out to me. The first thing was the encounter with “Eli the Traveler”. I was curious to see how they would play this in the movie, but I think they did a really good job in keeping it legit. They used the exact dialogue, and the man looked like and acted like exactly how I pictured him in the novel. The boy told the man “He’s scared papa.” This is straight from the book. I think they did a good job at keeping all of the dialogue the same. This again adds to the level of authenticity in the movie. The second thing that I thought they did a good job of keeping similar was the dialogue between the man and the boy. In the novel I always pictured the man as being very conservative, and treating the boy like he was his everything. This is how he was portrayed in the movie as well. He was cautious when helping others, and always treated the boy as if he was a king. The boy was also as I expected him to be. He was always scared and wanting to help others. In the film he always wants to help other people that they encounter, and this is very similar to the book. Overall, I think the filmmakers did an exceptional job of keeping the movie very similar to the text. There were not a lot of details from the story that I needed cleared up. The main thing that the film did that helped me was just making the dialogue between the two characters more understandable. As previously mentioned, this was one of t he major distractions in the book for me. By clearing up that dialogue, it made the story much easier to understand, and led to a good viewing experience for me. In conclusion, I think the film version of “The Road” is better than the text version. I think the filmmakers did a good job of making the film entertaining while still keeping it authentic to the text version. I really enjoyed reading this novel, and I am glad that we watched the movie to further enhance the experience. The movie was very enjoyable, and I am very thankful we got to watch it!