This was a very dark, gloomy and depressing film in which you wished in just one scene that the darn sun would shine. I spent a lot of my time squinting at the screen trying to make sense of what was going on. The story centers around two characters. Viggo Mortenson as the Father and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the Son who are forced into survival in a Earth now destroyed by man's greed and global warming has killed most life except for as it is explained in the film two different types of peoples....The good people and the bad ones which do nothing but resort to cannibalism. After we see flash backs of the Mother telling the father that he needs to see to it that he gets their son to the sea in the South because she has no more of a desire to go on living, and in a very moving scene we see The Father pleading with her to just spend one more night with him before she walks off and dies. She does not and walks off into the darkness. The rest of the film has the Father and Son fighting their way through burned out cities and across a barren landscape in which it rains almost every day. They fight for survival from what appears to be red-necks who eat human flesh and keep warm humans locked up in basements to be eaten later. The Father Manages to escape death several times and save his son with nothing more than his wits and a pistol with only 2 rounds in which only 1 is ever used.
They finally do reach the sea, which was the point that was pressed throughout the film but nothing happens once they are there. The last 20 minutes The Son spends on the beach watching The Father die. Before his death he tells The Son to keep going south. After The Fathers death The Son finds a good family while on the beach, which included a man, woman, little boy, girl and a dog. So was this the meaning for The Father to get his little boy to the ocean? To find a nice family living on the beach? This all seemed too simple an ending for a story that was pretty complex about survival in a world in which survival was everything. But as with all Hollywood films the ending had to be happy seeing how gloomy it was up to that point. It just seemed too good an ending....
They finally do reach the sea, which was the point that was pressed throughout the film but nothing happens once they are there. The last 20 minutes The Son spends on the beach watching The Father die. Before his death he tells The Son to keep going south. After The Fathers death The Son finds a good family while on the beach, which included a man, woman, little boy, girl and a dog. So was this the meaning for The Father to get his little boy to the ocean? To find a nice family living on the beach? This all seemed too simple an ending for a story that was pretty complex about survival in a world in which survival was everything. But as with all Hollywood films the ending had to be happy seeing how gloomy it was up to that point. It just seemed too good an ending....