The movie is even darker than the book. Perhaps that is because it really is dark. No light kind of dark. Nuclear winter dark. You can hardly see dark. They are both dark in the grim world view sense of the world--the book and the movie share that. The book is more graphic in the pervasive depths that surviving men have stooped to--we do not see gang rapes, merely cannibals who keep their future meals incarcerated, and we are left to imagine the worst. Charlie Theron plays the mother, who opts for suicide rather than face that fate herself and she begs the father to let her take their son with her, but he cannot and she does not push it. Viggo Mortenson show once again that he has the capacity to sympathetically express all sorts of men, to make them real for audiences. His body language is pitch perfect here, as the gaunt, haunted, dying father trying to find a ray of hope for his son before his own life ends.
The review I have linked to from the New York Times does not think the movie is bleak enough to really capture the end of the world--well, perhaps not, but it is definitely at the edge of the bleakness that one can manage to watch. The landscape is burnt earth--maybe exacerbated by nuclear winter. There are no bugs, no rodents, none of the things that you would think would outlive man in a catastrophe. the bleakness is oppressive. Who should watch this movie? Someone who thinks it will never happen. Or who thinks it will be okay if it does.
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