This was not a good film. I was really disappointed, b/c it seemed to a fairly novel idea. The problem was, the writing was just tremendously awful. First off, why would anyone bother to go to the lengths Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee went to in order to subsist on insects and melted snow, while trying to fend off disease, death, robbers, and cannibalistic road warriors? The entire premise of the film fell flat on its face. When they discussed taking their own lives, I kept thinking, "What in your right mind is stopping you?" There is literally no reason to continue living.

Second, the son was terribly written. I don't know what the writers were thinking, but they clearly didn't bother to consider the environment they'd created. This was a child born into a world of isolation and death. His mother had committed suicide, and he knew that in order to survive, he had to travel w/ his father, avoiding all the aforementioned pitfalls of this world. Yet, this child was the single most fearful child I'd ever seen.

At first, I thought that maybe he was autistic. I actually stopped the movie to look up the character online in order to determine if he'd been written as an autistic child, but there was no mention of it. He was just afraid of his own shadow. He was so scared of everything, I'd even go so far as to say that he was a coward. And, to top things off, he was 110 percent useless. He helped his father do absolutely nothing. [spoiler]As his father is spitting cupfulls of blood and limping on a bloody leg, does the kid help him pull the cart w/ all their belongings? Of course not! That's the father's job![/spoiler]

[spoiler]This kid was constantly crying about something, so in the end, when his father died, and he began to weep, I felt not a tinge of sympathy for him, b/c he'd spent the past two hours whining and crying. It completely took all the power out of the moment. Plus, the happy ending to the movie made this entire thing completely worthless. I really have no idea what people saw in this film.[/spoiler]