Careful — there are massive spoilers in the video. The Road is out November 25th.

The Road leads you to post-apocalyptic Hell on Nov. 25. [Yahoo! Movies]

We've heard that The Road was pushed back to this fall for many reasons, including being too depressing, and being primed for awards season.

Esquire Magazine is the first official outlet to screen and review the entire movie, and they can't say enough nice things about this awful movie. And of course, we mean "awful" in a the world is burned to a cinder, waters are poisoned, dirt is radiated, and there is nowhere to go post-apocalyptic way.

"It is a love story," Esquires Tom Chiarella eplains, "But to be clear, it's a love story about a father and a son hauling ass to keep from being eaten by small bands of flannel-shirted cannibals."

For those not familiar with the tale, the book follows a man and his boy as they trek across the wasteland that was our Earth. Heading to the coast, they have to protect themselves against dehydration, hypothermia, starvation, and cannibals looking for their next meal. Calling The Road bleak would be an understatement. And Esquire says the film fully lives up to the book:

...There was not a single stupid choice made in turning this book into this movie. No wrongheaded lyric tribute to the novel. No moment engineered simply to make you jump.

The article also reveals a first look at the new trailer for The Road, including explanations for what happened to Earth, with disaster clips and media blips. Which is taking pretty big liberties, since it sounds like the movie doesn't reference a reason for the tragedy, and neither does the novel. The director addressed this:

On the other side of the planet, at home in Australia, Hillcoat's been hearing about these trailers. "We're so conditioned by postapocalyptic films to be centered on a big event, and they become this high-concept thing. And here there's this total absence, this negation of explanation. We have to stay with that. So yeah. That's gonna be a challenge."

Hopefully the need to over-explain will be edited out of the final trailer... but probably not. Also, some of the imagery used in the film is from real-life disaster footage, which is quite brilliant yet even more terrifying than special effects:

"When they pass through a city, there's a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect," Hillcoat explained to Esquire. "That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There's a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape."

All in all the review is absolutely glowing, which gives me hope that this flick will do what was intended, crush your soul (and maybe lift you up just a tiny tad). If the review is accurate we should all leave the theater "feeling it in our chest plate," telling others to see it, yet unable to explain why. Which sounds exactly right - let's hope it's true.

Production Charts just posted this description of how the movie will translate the book's plot:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

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]

Poe penned the dark future tale Mellonta Tauta which is set in the year 2848 as a series of letters written during a balloon voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. These letters satirically comment on the what has happened to the United States during the past thousand years. He'd also written, fourteen years earlier, a story about a man taking a balloon journey to the moon. Seems like Poe really liked hot air for some reason.

Author Thomas Disch posits in his book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of who claims that Mellonta Tauta firmly roots Edgar Allan Poe as the originator of modern science fiction, since Poe loved exploring different realities, many of them dark and brooding. He re-explored futures similar to that one in Mellonta Tauta in both The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sceherazade and A Descent into the Maelstrom.

Sylvester Stallone directing a biopic about Edgar Allan Poe? Welcome to your different reality. Hunky Mortensen, star of Lord of the Rings trilogy and the recent Eastern Promises, is reportedly considering taking the role as long as some changes are made to the script. First up will be cutting the scene of Poe toting an M-60 into battle. Quoth the Rambo: "Nevermore."

Mortensen Up For Poe Biopic [Dark Horizons]
An Introduction To Edgar Allan Poe's Hans Pfaal [Infinity Plus]