15 years ago, the most influential post-apocalyptic film of the century terrified audiences

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. A grumpy old survivor of the apocalypse roam deserted highways and deserted streets, their keen eyes searching for resources or sudden threats. They are both predator and prey, but their guarded independence is compromised by a young child under their protection, one who grew up in the aftermath of a terrible event and still has much to learn about the evil in the world. The more innocent protected gives the older Shepherd a burning sense of purpose, driving him or her toward personal, spiritual purification, even as the world around them remains tainted and scorched.

This is the story of The roadboth from 2006 Cormac McCarthy novel and its film adaptation by John Hillcoat, although the power of the brutal meditation on surviving catastrophe lives on in the DNA of so many post-apocalyptic films. In the film, which debuted fifteen years ago, our perspective stays unwaveringly close to a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they trudge south along a vast, empty road toward the coast. The man’s inner thoughts tell us everything about their journey, from his backstory – his wife (Charlize Theron) took her own life to prevent a more gruesome demise along the way – to how he understands his duty.

He defines himself and his son by what they are not – cannibals or robbers – and falls back on an unyielding but vague creed of goodness, of ‘bearing the fire’. This purported refrain feels like a will or wish projected onto a cruel world, dependent on God’s light without belief in divine intervention. “The boy is my command,” the Man confides to us. “If he is not the word of God, God never spoke.” As he says this, we see Mortensen’s dirty face staring at us with a piercing gaze. It reminds us of something wordlessly missing from McCarthy’s exploration of humanity: the power of seeing real human faces in the midst of Armageddon.

Over the past fifteen years, post-apocalyptic media has taken advantage of this The road‘s elemental power, even if they cannot recapture it. There are obscure indie remixes like the Martin Freeman starrer Cargothe Australian These last hours, or Casey Affleck’s Light of my lifeas well as mid-range thrillers that borrow dynamism and breathless dread Birdhouse or A quiet place. The films that most resemble Hillcoat’s minimalist, strictly paranoid vision of an ash-covered sloping landscape do not copy its most defining narrative choices, but It comes at night, the Survivalist, And The Robber have imprinted upon them similar levels of despair and spiritual grief.

These less respected titles all take up far less cultural space than McCarthy and Hillcoat’s text, which is not something you could say The last of usthe clearest successor to the story archetype set out in The road. It was a mega-hit video game upon its initial release in 2013. There’s no ubiquitous or defining post-apocalyptic story these days, with two massive games packed with zombie-like action and a big-budget TV series telling the story of the jaded Joel tasked with guiding a would-be savior, Ellie, in a fungus-infected America. Because The road is so bare, streamlined and narrow in focus, that these and other riffs all feel like they’re building on established foundations.

But while The roadThe impact of the film is undeniable, McCarthy and Hillcoat’s vision of people forced into pure barbarism is imperfect. Some violent images feel tasteless; Piles of torn shoes, followed by a malnourished, sickly crowd trapped in darkness, evoke images of the Holocaust and similar atrocities, but with no interest in exploring these images further, they merely aestheticize historical horror and divorce them from their real meaning . Instead of the specific, creepy images being copied by post-apocalypse cinema, The roadJohn’s mood and drive are claimed as the core tenets of the genre.

This isn’t to suggest that The road is a purely original story. Stories like Children of men And The walking deadboth driven by similar quests and archetypes, predating McCarthy’s book. Outside of the post-apocalyptic genre, the dynamic of a wanderer and his young charge is common Westerns And Samurai movies dates back decades. Since almost all Western post-apocalypse stories touch on themes of family, the passing of generations, and purpose in a horrible world, this is a likely starting point for The road lies in religion – the story of Joseph leading Jesus and Mary to Bethlehem and then to Egypt, out of fear of persecution, is rather a basis for The road And Children of men than any contemporary text.

With this in mind, The road doesn’t feel like the most influential post-apocalyptic drama, but it does feel like the most essential, one that sharpens and enriches the emotional core of the genre without the need for extraneous sci-fi or horror details. That’s why the film feels so definitive, even though its story has clear precedents and its cultural presence has been overshadowed in the fifteen years since its release. The road is what you get when you realize that the basic building blocks of apocalyptic stories are enough to devastate us.