The Road is set in a burned America, ruined after an unknown disaster. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) embark on a long journey to the coast. In addition to coping with the wrecked countryside, the pair are also stalked by a gang of cannibals. In a new piece, the New York Times describes the movie's look as monotone and bleak, "The sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams."

How close will the movie stay to the book? Screenwriter Joe Penhall only admitted to fleshing out the fathers flashbacks and memories with his wife (Charlize Theron). The NYT explained that while they couldn't include most of McCarthy's narrative, a lot of that feeling will come from the overall look of the movie and from the acting. The location was selected primarily due to its "post-apocalyptic scenery" including a dunes, deserted coalfields, a burned-down amusement park and an 8-minute stretch of bare highway.

Road's director John Hillcoat went to painstaking ends to recreate this novel in a realistic manner:

"What's moving and shocking about McCarthy's book is that it's so believable," Mr. Hillcoat said. "So what we wanted is a kind of heightened realism, as opposed to the 'Mad Max' thing, which is all about high concept and spectacle. We're trying to avoid the clichés of apocalypse and make this more like a natural disaster."

So sorry Doomsday and Mad Max fans, no mohawks and crazy face tattoos. The characters in The Road are a product of their circumstances and wear whatever they can find, while stuffing their clothes with garbage insulation.

The NYT follows Viggo Mortensen in one scene where he chases after a stranger (Michael Kenneth Williams) who stole his belongings. After catching up with that man, Mortensen takes everything he has and leaves him to freeze while his son pleads with him to forgive the old man. [New York Times and Awards Daily]

It's in your toothpaste!! "Highly evolved nanostructures" such as Bucky balls are already being used in toothpaste and face cream, among other household products. What if your exfoliating, revitalizing beauty cream suddenly turned eeeevil? The possibilities are as infinite as the spaces between molecules. Maybe the nano-structures aren't just passive, but actually contain tiny nanites that start eating your face? You could have a rash (so to speak) of corpses with melty faces, and our heroes have to figure out why, before...

...the awful countdown. There has to be some horrendous clock ticking down to N-day, the day the rogue nanites bust out and consume everything. Maybe the melty-face people are just the first wave, or maybe some evil nanomachines got activated prematurely by mistake. (Or maybe it's just an excuse to have some smooshy faces, which who doesn't love?) But there's a monster computer that plans to release all of the nanites at the same time, which isn't just immediately for some reason. (Or the nanites just get released by accident — but an evil AI is more fun.) Our heroes have to rush to stop it, but... they're too late.

The gray goo is consuming everything. It expands exponentially, so the more it consumes, the faster it spreads. In Wil McCarthy's Bloom, it only takes a few hours for gray goo to swallow up Earth's ecosystem. Similarly, in Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, the "nants" manage to swallow up the entire Earth within about a day. So the gray goo starting to be released should probably be the "break" between the second and third acts of the movie or TV show. (At the same time, our heroes should have an important personal realization, and confront something or other about themselves, blah blah blah.)

The nano-ooze should have a catchphrase. Nobody is ever going to care about nano-gunk that doesn't have a swagger in its voice. Maybe the nan-ooze speaks through your computer speakers, or grows a giant mouth, which says something like, "You Are Our Raw Material." Or something catchier, like "Your Biosphere Will Be Disassembled." (We'll save the truly dumb catchphrase, like "The Goo Will Be You," for the movie poster.)

So there's a program that can deactivate the gray goo, or maybe a firewall that it can't pass for some reason. But in order to deploy this magic-bullet code, our main character has to face his/her greatest fear. Or confront a mistake he/she made long ago. Or maybe our heroes discover that another batch of nanomachines can neutralize the first batch by altering their function.

We see the face of god in the heart of the goo. Once our heroes come face to face with the wall of goo, there really ought to be some sort of 2001/Sunshine-y moment of confronting the vastness of the micro-world and maybe coming up against the divine in everything. Maybe the nano-machines teach us an important lesson about what it means to be human, or the soul, or something. Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, who always turn into spiritual guides when you least expect it. Everything gets all rhapsodic and we break out the wobbly lens so the gray goo can teach us some important lesson before it vanishes into a haze of mystification. That's your awesome gray goo movie right there. And they said it would never work.

McCarthy, a former comic artist who's been providing storyboards and concept designs for movies like Highlander, Lost in Space and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles since the late '80s, has started posting some of his work on his new website, The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy, including a glimpse at what might have been if Dan Ackroyd's inherent crapness hadn't ruined things.
Design">The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy

This novel is about the arduous journey a father undertakes as he tries to get his son to safety after nuclear fallout and war has ravaged the world and turned most of the survivors into flesh-eating cannibals. The father and his son push a grocery cart through the wasteland, scavenging for food and supplies as they try to survive. The father's wife, long dead and seen only in brief flashbacks, will be played by Theron who is apparently a huge fan of the novel.

She'll be joined by either Guy Pearce or Viggo Mortensen as the father. However, having devotedly read all of McCarthy's novels, I'm not sure how what's on the page will translate to the screen very well, especially with these celebricons. Of course, I could be wrong. Even McCarthy's allegedly unfilmable Blood Meridian is getting a movie version, courtesy of Ridley Scott, so maybe filmmakers have cracked the code. After all, I never thought I'd enjoy No Country For Old Men on the big screen, but I was wrong about that one too.

Charlize Theron Hits The Road [Variety]

The New Frontier DVD follows Hal Jordan from the Korean War to the Kennedy era, and he becomes Green Lantern along the way. Jordan and the Martian Manhunter are the stars of the new DVD film, according to the screenwriter. Putting "Silver Age" characters back into the 1950s and 1960s makes them seem less dated, and also lets Cooke comment on issues like racism and McCarthyism. The movie hits multiple DVD formats on February 26th, 2008.

But The New Frontier isn't the only classic graphic novel to use this technique. James (Starman) Robinson won plaudits for The Golden Age, a graphic novel which followed a group of classic 1940s heroes as they coped with (once again) McCarthyism in the early 1950s. His comic starred Starman, Robotman, the original Atom and Johnny Thunder.

And then there's John Byrne's underrated Superman & Batman: Generations, which showed both heroes starting their careers in 1939, the year they originally appeared. Byrne placed the heroes in a classic setting (at the 1939 World's Fair), then showed them aging in real time. Both Superman and Batman deal with aging and handing over their responsibilities to their kids and sidekicks. (Later installments follow them into the present day and beyond.)

DC has also published several "Elseworlds" stories taking place in alternate universes, featuring Batman in the 1930s and 1940s. These include Detective 27, Citizen Wayne (a Citizen Kane riff), and Gotham Noir.

Famous names: Kevin McCarthy Don Siegel

Crunchy goodness: rate 4

Life lesson: Vegetables are dangerous; eat steak.

Most painfully dated moment: Public health professionals who will sit up with you all night listening to your "alien space pod invasion" story.

Deadliest spoiler: The Soviet Union eventually collapses.

Review and Synopsis of Movie by Tim Dirks