watching movies one cup at a time

I’ll warn you up front that there are “spoilers” in this review since people are making a big deal about the ending. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know the ending, skip this review until later.

I read “The Mist” when I was in high school and I have always really liked it. I had mixed feelings about a movie version but in general I was pretty excited to see it. We all know how mixed Stephen King movies can be. But one of Frank Darabont’s other Stephen King movies, The Shawshank Redemption, is absolutely brilliant. So the odds were in favor of this one turning out better than most.

The story is basically a monster movie/disaster flick. A thick mist descends on a town and it’s filled with horrible creatures possibly from another dimension. A group of survivors are holed up in a supermarket but things quickly unravel and between gruesome monster attacks and panic-driven mob insanity, all seems pretty hopeless.

The movie does succeed at being quite scary and tense. The fear of the unknown is always extremely powerful. It goes back to our childhood fear of the dark. And the more universal fear of losing our safety, our comfort zone, and loved ones to a tragic disaster we can’t control in a post-9/11 and post-Katrina world just heighten the tension. Add to that a psychological breakdown of over-zealous mob rule in the face of adversity when a religious nut uses the unfolding nightmare as her vehicle to whipping up a religious fervor and elevating herself to a position of power. And so you have a pretty decent movie operating on a few levels.

However, its always going to essentially be a scary monster movie. The action scenes of killing monsters and watching the humans get ripped to shreds puts the film in more in the genre of movies like Reign of Fire, 28 Days Later, or Cloverfield. Not Shawshank Redemption or other more serious dramas that Darabont has directed before based on King’s writing.

The problem though is that Darabont is trying to play both sides of that coin. He is making a monster movie that wants to be a serious drama and unfortunately that doesn’t mesh well to me. A better example would be the all-time classic King adaptation, The Shining directed by Stanley Kubrick. But what I think keeps The Mist from reaching that level is a couple things. Mainly it’s the monsters. They are pretty nasty and the horror and shock at seeing these things is going to just solidify the feeling that this is just a monster movie. Secondly the actors are just not the top level of a Tim Robbins or Tom Hanks to convey all of the complexity needed to make the drama more compelling. Don’t get me wrong, they do a great job, they are by no means bad actors. But male lead Thomas Jane wastes no time in showing off his muscles and punching people which to me made him more of a genre action hero type (he did star in The Punisher not too long ago).

Now let’s talk about the ending. Much has been said about the ending of the movie. It is definitely different from the book. It was written by Darabont (who wrote the screenplay) and blessed by King who loved the new ending. Many people out there think the ending is fantastic. And probably just as many think it’s terrible. I fall in to the camp that thinks it’s terrible. In the book, the story ends unresolved. It’s open-ended. The small band of people who escaped the supermarket drive off into an uncertain future in an uncertain world. You don’t know if the mist will EVER end or if it has in fact enveloped the world. In the movie, the small band that escapes drives and drives until there is no more gas. And when the gas runs out and all hope seems to be lost, they decide that suicide is the better solution to being attacked by the creatures. What makes this especially gut-wrenching is the fact that the main characters kid is with them and must be shot by his own father. But of course after he does all that and is the only one left alive with no more bullets, the frickin’ army shows up and the mist goes away.

I’m not one of those people who thinks all movies should have a happy sunshine hollywood ending. But what was wrong with the original ending? I liked the fact that it was open-ended like that.  It should have left you with a sense of dread that maybe the whole world HAD been enveloped by the mist but not provided an answer. We never know where the creatures come from, what they are exactly. or how many different kinds there are. A more ambiguous ending would have fit. Not some frickin’ Sophie’s Choice kid-killing suicide crap. Because like I was saying earlier, it’s a monster movie and never escapes that. It is NOT a drama, so why get all dramatic at the end!  It doesn’t fit.  It doesn’t fit that they would give up so easily after spending the past 2 hours fighting for their lives and facing nightmare horrors to escape just to run out of gas and off themselves.

And speaking as a parent, I NEVER need to see kids get killed in a movie. ESPECIALLY killed, however mercifully the intentions, by a parent. No thanks. The world really is filled with plenty of those kinds of nightmares already. I don’t need entertainment to add to that. And then to have the army show up minutes later, making the whole suicide/murder thing totally avoidable if they had waited literally a FEW MINUTES felt extremely too convenient and manipulative. Again, this movie is not a serious drama. It’s not Schindler’s List. Don’t tack on a new ending straight out of the depressing melodramatic movies hall of fame. Some people say this ending is more “real” or ties into so lofty ideas about hope and sacrifice. I don’t care about all that, I don’t go to these kinds of movies to see kids get shot by their parents.

Besides that I didn’t like the military coming in and “saving the day” clearing away the mist. A real strong part of the terror is the feeling of not knowing if the Mist will ever end. It could go on forever and be filled with even worse creatures than they have seen. To have it all cleared away by dudes with just flamethrowers and gas masks just felt really anticlimactic.

The movie is flawed and I hated the ending. But otherwise it’s very scary and I did enjoy it.