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Dec. 2nd, 2009 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynI have a fondness for post-apocalyptic fiction of many kinds, and I acknowledge that most of it is grim as all hell. However, I have not had any particular interest in seeing The Road, and today I had it confirmed for me once and for all that this is not a movie I am going to see. Neither will I be reading the book. What made it plain was picking up a copy of the book at the drugstore and flipping it over to see if the movie tie-in edition mentioned anything about exactly what happened, and finding the words 'In a world with no hope'.
Yeah. That, there. That's where I stop.
I am not asking for a happy ending from everything I read or watch. I appreciate tragedies, even as I sit there sucking my breath through my teeth and going "Ooh, sucks to be you, Creon." I can appreciate ambiguous, unhappy endings; I liked The Departed, after all. I appreciated The Killer's ending, horrible as it was for all the characters involved. I was deeply impressed by Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and cannot think of a more satisfying way to end that story. But what I do ask, of my story and my setting, is that there be some kind of hope- even if it's dangled in front of the characters and then horribly yanked away, as it was in The Killer. There has to be a chance, somewhere, or I am not interested.
It's why I never got into Wraith: The Whatever-It-Is, back in original World of Darkness gaming. Basically, you... were dead. And then things sucked more. And if you were lucky, you... vanished, maybe, or something, and nobody really knew what else there was. But regardless, you were dead and there was no way in hell you could change the system. It's why I couldn't really get into the Disney movie Dinosaur. Yes, very good, our hero has his girlfriend and now they have their hatchlings; did anyone miss the giant flaming meteors that were falling? They weren't the Chicxulub impact, but they were a very clear reminder that no matter what these two did or how happy they were, extinction's hammer was going to drop on them and that would be the end of that. Maybe if they'd been dinosaurs from earlier in the Mesozoic, so that they had millions of years for their descendants to grow in, but the lemur things in the movie made it clear just how little time there was left. No hope for them.
Everything I've heard about The Road indicates that the disaster that created that world destroyed virtually the entire biosphere. Humanity is living on whatever oxygen hasn't been breathed up or burned up, and eating whatever's been canned or dried. This is not a disaster from which there is any hope of coming back. This is not a disaster which offers anyone any hope of redemption through suffering. This is the grinding down and going out against which there is no fighting to improve. It's over. At least in Fallout, there's a chance of some kind of recovery- purely localized or maybe on a larger scale, I don't know. At least in Half-Life, there's a snowball's chance in Hell of pushing out the Combine and recovering, even if the world has to adjust to a much weirder equilibrium than before. I won't bring Reign of Fire into this, its setup is just too silly, but the idea remains the same. There's still life in all of them, and a tiny fraction of a chance, and even if that's cruelly kicked out from under the protagonists at least it was there to start with.
But from what I understand, there isn't even that in The Road, and I am not going to pay money or go to the effort of hitting the library to watch the flailings of humanity's pathetic still-moving corpse. No matter how powerful or well-written or well-directed it is.
*locates only real appropriate icon for this one*
Yeah. That, there. That's where I stop.
I am not asking for a happy ending from everything I read or watch. I appreciate tragedies, even as I sit there sucking my breath through my teeth and going "Ooh, sucks to be you, Creon." I can appreciate ambiguous, unhappy endings; I liked The Departed, after all. I appreciated The Killer's ending, horrible as it was for all the characters involved. I was deeply impressed by Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and cannot think of a more satisfying way to end that story. But what I do ask, of my story and my setting, is that there be some kind of hope- even if it's dangled in front of the characters and then horribly yanked away, as it was in The Killer. There has to be a chance, somewhere, or I am not interested.
It's why I never got into Wraith: The Whatever-It-Is, back in original World of Darkness gaming. Basically, you... were dead. And then things sucked more. And if you were lucky, you... vanished, maybe, or something, and nobody really knew what else there was. But regardless, you were dead and there was no way in hell you could change the system. It's why I couldn't really get into the Disney movie Dinosaur. Yes, very good, our hero has his girlfriend and now they have their hatchlings; did anyone miss the giant flaming meteors that were falling? They weren't the Chicxulub impact, but they were a very clear reminder that no matter what these two did or how happy they were, extinction's hammer was going to drop on them and that would be the end of that. Maybe if they'd been dinosaurs from earlier in the Mesozoic, so that they had millions of years for their descendants to grow in, but the lemur things in the movie made it clear just how little time there was left. No hope for them.
Everything I've heard about The Road indicates that the disaster that created that world destroyed virtually the entire biosphere. Humanity is living on whatever oxygen hasn't been breathed up or burned up, and eating whatever's been canned or dried. This is not a disaster from which there is any hope of coming back. This is not a disaster which offers anyone any hope of redemption through suffering. This is the grinding down and going out against which there is no fighting to improve. It's over. At least in Fallout, there's a chance of some kind of recovery- purely localized or maybe on a larger scale, I don't know. At least in Half-Life, there's a snowball's chance in Hell of pushing out the Combine and recovering, even if the world has to adjust to a much weirder equilibrium than before. I won't bring Reign of Fire into this, its setup is just too silly, but the idea remains the same. There's still life in all of them, and a tiny fraction of a chance, and even if that's cruelly kicked out from under the protagonists at least it was there to start with.
But from what I understand, there isn't even that in The Road, and I am not going to pay money or go to the effort of hitting the library to watch the flailings of humanity's pathetic still-moving corpse. No matter how powerful or well-written or well-directed it is.
*locates only real appropriate icon for this one*
