What caused the apocalypse in ‘The Road’?
The novels of Cormac McCarthy have always looked like good prospects for a film adaptation, and one of the best was the 2009 John Hillcoat film The Road, which was adapted from McCarthy’s 2006 novel of the name name. Famously, the movie starred Viggo Mortensen and Kodi-Smit McPhee.
The two actors play a man and son in a post-apocalyptic world, and their only desire is to survive. The Road is a harrowing watch, but there’s one thing that never seems to get answered, and that’s what exactly caused the apocalypse. Hillcoat never gives any direct answer to this question.
But if we look into the Cormac McCarthy novel, there are some clues as to what may have caused the end of the world as we once knew it. McCarthy, at one point, suggests that there was a meteor strike without ever explicitly stating so, so that may well be the reason for the man and son’s devastating situation.
One passage reads, “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? She said. He didn’t answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was gone.”
The shear of light through the sky does indeed indicate that a meteor flew through the sky and cut out the power to the man’s house. However, there is another possibility. That shear of light could have also been a nuclear missile, which would have had the same effect as a meteor.
We should take into account the fact that the man and the boy find several dead bodies in their cars or in their houses, which suggests that it was an intense blast of radiation, which would kill people instantly, as opposed to a meteor, which might affect the planet’s atmosphere so much that people died out slowly.
There are a few more points to be made for the case of a meteor, though. The first is that the world in The Road is covered in ash, which would have a meteor make sense as it would likely cause the Earth’s volcanos to erupt and release a barrage of ash. But then again, the man’s cough may indicate a nuclear attack.
The other is that most of the animals on Earth would die after a meteor, as it had done millions of years ago in the real world. The man wonders whether there are any crows left on the planet, which suggests that most animals did indeed die out.
Ultimately, the real reason for the apocalypse is impossible to say for sure, but it’s likely that it was either a nuclear warhead or a meteor that did the damage. The actual reason isn’t essential, though, to the brilliance of both the film and the novel.
Check out the film’s trailer below.
