The Mist

By: themovielord
Date: Saturday, November 24, 2007

After a chaotic storm, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) heads to town with his son (Nathan Gamble) and neighbor (Andre Braugher). They become trapped in a grocery store after a man (Jeffrey DeMunn) runs in with a bloody face and says he was attacked by something in the mist.

I particularly like films that start off in an everyday common place and become terrifying. King is the master of this; hotels, corner store, hospital, a car… So when I heard that Frank Darabont was translating another one of King’s works to the screen (‘Shawshank Redemption’ and The Green Mile’) I was ready from the get go with a ticket in my hand.

‘The Mist’ opens with two great tributes. The first is a horror poster of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ and the other is Thomas Jane painting the movie poster to King’s own Dark Tower series. The film takes a natural catastrophe and quickly reveals that bitter neighbors are deep down good hearted people; a little post 9/11 optimism but one that is easily accepted by the audience. The story quickly moves to the grocery store and a microcosm of characters are revealed. It doesn’t take long for the story to get moving and before you have a sense of everyone the Mist has already moved in. The skepticism and judgment of characters happen very quickly. In short, most people (in this small town) don’t trust each other. Whether this device is used to speed up the book for the movie’s time constraints or it is the way it was written was uncertain. I felt everyone turned on each other a little too quickly for my taste. King and Darabont reference a time table of events on how fast people can lose hope, gain faith, and turn on each other after you take away reason and electricity. This might be the most terrifying thing about ‘The Mist’ because once the creatures do show up they aren’t very scary. I know I am not spoiling anything because they are after all in the trailer.

The monsters do arrive and it saddened me seeing them in the trailer because I would have rather had a story that was ambiguous about what was actually in the Mist. The fear of the unknown is ten times scarier that giant bugs or flying four winged lizards. The CGI here is not the greatest. Why weren’t a few extra dollars spent on their rendering time or some Stan Winston creature effects is beyond me; especially with Darabont's track record. The creatures are creepy crawly but lose their scare pretty quick.

As characters go King runs the gauntlet of them and gives us the one character that bothered me the most; the religious fanatic played by Marcia Gay Harden. At first you think there is always a religious one, someone always thinks that this disaster is an act of God. Now for all of her whining and seeing signs, I wanted her to be right for a change. She quickly became the villain and a caricature. When harm did befall her and the audience applauded and cheered.   I wondered if the audience hated her because of her convictions or that they were now part of the gang that believed they should escape the grocery store and make a run for it. I think it would have been a scarier story if she would have been right and God was testing them. Harden is great because you do dislike her but that is because after she is done preaching she swears like a sailor off setting the pious woman she pretends to be.

I started to think, how was this going to end? Would it be like ‘The Birds’ and the survivors would walk to their cars and the monsters would just sit their and stare? Would Thomas Jane wake up in his home and realize it was all a dream? The ending that did happen was the original ending from the book and according to Darabont was unchangeable because of an agreement with King. It left me upset. Not at its conclusion but because after all they went through it betrayed their characters.

‘The Mist’ is a once a done film and maybe not even a one timer. It starts off in the right place but leaves you lost in a… well you know.


Click here to read the staff review by Mania.