I liked this, mostly because I like the story so much and it was great to see it on film. It also had a certain “you are there” quality to it, but I can’t figure out why. The book’s ending is better though. I guess they felt they had to have something definitive happen at the end, rather than the book’s more ambiguous ending.
what was the original ending?
I like King’s end a whole lot better. When I was reading Stephen King as a child, books like “Thinner” had the perfect ending - the stage was set for some last awful event, where you knew something bad was going to happen, but you weren’t quite sure if all the characters would survive or not. To me, it was a chance to extend the story myself, to imagine all the ways it could go. Since I was reading a book that engaged my imagination anyway, I was in a perfect spot to continue the story myself.
This film ending is just cliched and stupid. Does our hero scream “NOOOOOOOO” while the camera slowly circles around him and rises up into the sky, only to pan onto a setting sun?
That new ending has pretty much killed any desire I had to watch this movie. I might still rent it on DVD one day, but there’s no way I’m paying to watch it in theaters.
I liked the ending.
I didn’t care for the use of Dead Can Dance, though.
Wow, I was going to argue that there was nothing wrong with the ending, but this criticism is so bang-on on all levels that I immediately concede. But I’ve always thought Darabont was an overrated, mediocre director - the Majestic? Green Mile? Shawshank is a fine movie, but one of the most overrated films of all time. “slo-mo to Serbian funeral music” - yeah, debate over.
That said, I liked the Mist, because I’m a sucker for monster/creature films and Stephen King, and this is a pretty solid adaptation with some cool critters. I wish they didn’t have a crazy Christian woman as the villain (and I think that those trailers highlighting her probably will really hurt the film commercially), but that’s right out of the book, and since King also wrote the Christian-friendly Stand, it evens out. Plus the emphasis is on her just being a crazy person, who happens to be Christian, not that all Christians would act in that fashion. I was less keen on the soldiers being depicted as useless cowards and victims, but that’s hardly unusual in film these days, and at least the military got the last laugh in the revised ending.
The film actually feels kind of quaint because it’s so tame compared to the gore/slasher/torture/teen sex mix of contemporary horror films. But end of the world/monster flicks are almost always going to get thumbs up for me, and the Mist is actually better than most. Tom - it was also not “big budget” - it had a tiny budget ($15m), and looks pretty damn good despite it. It’s kind of similar to a big budget Twilight Zone or “Masters of Horror” episode. I also really like Thomas Jane, even in his bad flicks, and the Mist is no Punisher.
While the actual unfolding of the ending is hamfisted, as Tom indicates, I didn’t mind the narrative results, although I would have been fine with the original too. It’s actually a lot more optimistic from a perspective larger than the characters, although obviously not on a more personal level. I guess in an effort to make the film seem more action-oriented the new TV ads are completely giving away the ending which is a real shame. Anyone who’s read the book can figure it out from those clips. It didn’t feel cliched (strange description - chiche of what?), it was actually pretty horrific, and I liked the overall theme or moral of “never give up”, which everyone should have already learned from Terminator 1.
Thank fucking god you’re completely wrong about this movie, Tom, since I generally agree with your film reviews.
I guess what I’d heard was that it was big-budget in terms of special effects. But, yeah, $15m is the cost of a silly cheap genre-movie, and it explains why our nerdy crack shooter (I really liked that actor, by the way, and he was excellent in The Painted Veil) is killed by the silhouette of a giant scorpion instead of a giant scorpion proper. I imagine poor Thomas Jane’s rate is probably holding steady these days. Guy can’t get a break. :(
The thing is that I wasn’t impressed with any (either?) of the effects sequences. I guess that’s the problem with trying (mind you, trying rather than actually succeeding) to flesh out implied stuff with CG. Even the big Cthulhu walker elephant thing was kind of disappointing. Didn’t the short story have something about a creature with “legs as big as skyscrapers” that reached so high into the mist they couldn’t see it? That image stuck with me. Yet another CG Mumakil preceded by T Rex stompy effects not so much.
The flying things were dumb and unscary. Tentacles always work, but I was disappointed they they literally went nowhere. The spiders were just stupid, like something dreamed up by a 12-year-old. “What if they had armor plates over their mouths and really big teeth? Oh, I know! What if they shot acid webs? Oooh, put spikes on their backs! What if they laid eggs inside you and you got full of baby spiders and blew up?” Whatever, Darabont. Put up the notebook doodles and hire an artist already.
The movie helpfully brings along a few red shirts to demonstrate the monsters’ powers, but that only works if you focus more on the monsters. But The Mist was trying too hard to be a Night of the Living Dead, focusing on the people under siege and doing a really poor job of making them anything but stupid caricatures. There’s noble biker dude! Nerdy fellow who pulls through and saves the day! Stuck-up lawyer guy! Hick auto mechanic! Every other line out of Marcia Gay Harden’s mouth was cringe-worthy. “If I wanted a friend like you, I’d squat and shit one out”. Jeeze. They could have saved my time and theirs by giving her a brightly colored T-shirt that said “I AM TEH BAD GUY”.
If Darabont had actually bothered to develop characters to kill them, the movie might have worked better. For instance, when the young checker chick dies from a bug sting, that was cool because it was unexpected, gruesome, and followed some attempt – however shallow – at developing her. But then you have some random dude getting burned, which leads to this kind of stuff:
-
“We need to get drugs for Joe! Who is the guy that got burned. That’s who Joe is, in case you’re wondering. We know you didn’t meet him until he got burned, but you’re meeting him now. He’s Joe. He needs drugs, which is why we’re going next door. For Joe!”
-
“This is Joe’s brother! He’s coming with us (to demonstrate how the acid spider webs work)!”
-
“Oh, uh, hey, now that we’re done with the whole Joe’s brother thing, Joe died while you were asleep.”
Look, movie, either develop your red shirts or don’t. If I’m going to watch a story about Thomas Jane protecting his son from monsters – and that’s a something I want to see – you need to choose your focus. Random grocery bagger dragged away by tentacles and splattering Thomas Jane with blood? Cool. Much debate about what did and didn’t happen that divides the trapped people into two factions, one representing irrational religion and willful ignornace, the other representing reason and survival and fatherhood? Not cool, unless you get a better script.
The audience I saw it with wasn’t into it either. By the time the ending rolled around – that laughable, awkward, ham-handed ending – people were getting restless and laughing. Actually, they were laughing during most of Marcia Gay Harden’s dialog, but the somber ‘I’ve only got four bullets’ moment was like an inadvertent punchline. And once the mist clears and the soldiers show up, hoo-boy, this audience was ready to leave. I beat every single one of them out the door.
-TomI hate so much about the things you choose to be.
Tom - all good points. All of them. The monsters are right from the book though, so you can blame King not Darabont. That sillouttee of the dida-chum was pretty bad – in fact, how’s this for cheap - if you look at the current TV ads, they actually have one of the scenes with the scorpion in the movie, BUT BEFORE THEY BOTHERED TO PUT THE MONSTER IN - so the actor (to be cryptic, the guy banging at the door who is yanked) is seen to be flying into air as if by telekensis in the TV ad. The same TV ad that gives away the ending. Fuckers.
Particularly true is your comment about the inability to develop the background other than to exactly the point where they seem important, but we can’t remember who the fuck they’re talking about, or what the burned guy looked like before he was burned. Two actors were decent - the midget Ollie (who i thought was excellent, in a pretty tough role) and the black lawyer from Canadian TV. Actually the teacher was ok - which brings me to the best edit ever of a book scene - cutting out the scene where Thomas Jane has sex with the teacher, which makes zero sense in the context of the story for the characters, other than to highlight King had the sensibilities of a 14 year old boy. Good job on that Darabont.
…but there’s monsters! … and most of look pretty good, and the story is played straight and not campy - there aren’t even those typical misplaced laugh lines. And Thomas Jane is great for that kind of action role. For those reasons alone, I enjoyed it a lot more than most of the movies I’ve seen this year, even though it’s a 5 or 6/10 at best. I liked it a hell of a lot more than American Gangster, even though it’s not the same calibur of movie.
The novella the movie is based on did not have an “unrealistically happy ending”, it had an ambiguous ending that left the fate of the survivors open to question.
Which was a lot better than Darabont’s ham-fisted moralizing.
Let’s take a look at what actually happens (specific SPOILERS ahoy!):
Dave and seven others plan to leave the store, get into his SUV and drive through the mist until they escape it or run out of gas. On the way out three of the eight fall prey to the creatures. Five get in and they head off.
They drive to David’s house. He weeps at the sight of his wife wrapped up in a spider cocoon. Then it’s time to hit the road and we watch as they pass crashed cars and a school bus with the camera passing over a web-coated tot (aw!) Finally, the SUV runs out of gas and sputters to a stop. They have made it to where they are without incident, as far as we can see. Nothing has attacked them, nothing much of anything has happened while the incessant musical score reminds us how tragic and awful all of this is.
So, with the vehicle out of gas, the one guy shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, no one can say we didn’t try!” The sassy old school teacher agrees. “Nope!” Then David pulls out the gun, counts the bullets and proceeds to shoot everyone with their consent, leaving himself alive (not enough bullets) and wailing and gnashing over cruel fate and how it mocks him.
In what seems like a few minutes later, a massive military convoy comes rumbling up – from the same direction the SUV came from – allowing Darabont to further bludgeon the point home about how fate is not just cruel but really dang cruel. And if you still don’t get the point, the camera pans across a truck rolling by filled with doe-eyed kids the army has saved from certain death. Too bad David just put a bullet in the head of his own son, huh? Sucks to be him (lol)!
It’s just absurd. It’s ludicrous. There is no logical reason, no build-up in the story to suggest the people heading out in the SUV would choose suicide at what amounts to the drop of a hat. It is simply unbelievable and pulls off the neat trick of tearing down everything in the movie that came before it. Sure, the ending is “daring” and “different”. It’s also senseless and unsatisfying on every level.
I wanted to watch a good horror flick based on a good horror story, what I got was a film about people I ended up not giving a damn about. Too bad that giant creature didn’t come back and squish Jane like a bug under one of its feet. That would have provided some small satisfaction, at least.
[READ ABOVE SPOILERS, MENTIONING SAME SPOILERS]
[SPOILERS BELOW]
Wow, mass murder/suicide and murdering one’s own son, on the part of the protagonist. I’m a big believer in “doing what works” in story development, but it would take quite a lot to convince me that doing that is what works.
Caveat: I haven’t seen the movie yet, but have been considering it.
What Creole said. Although, to be fair, before our intrepid road trip survivors decide to call it quits, Darabont did make a point of looping in the sounds of snarling monsters presumably drawing near. The implication was that they were about to be eaten, egg-infested, clawed in half, or tentacle raped.
Another funny thing about the ending is that there are two National Guardsmen who walk right up to Thomas Jane after he’s shot his son and three passenger. They’re wearing gas maks, so you can’t see their faces. But I’d swear they do a look down at Thomas Jane, kneeling and weeping like Job, and then a look at each other. It’s a silent burlesque of ‘What’s his deal?’
The only thing funnier would have been if they’d stopped and investigated the scene. Hmm, an SUV with a blood spattered interior. Four victims, gunshots wounds to the temple. Empty revolver clutched in a wailing man’s hand.
“Sir, we’re going to have to arrest you for quadruple homicide. You have the right to remain silent, etc., etc.”
And…finis!
-TomCount me among those who didn’t feel that the ending worked, at all.
It just seemed to me like they gave up too easy. I understand that Drayton has promised his son that he won’t let him get taken by the monsters, but would you really just give up and kill everyone with you - including your own son - just moments after the SUV has run out of gas?
As others have pointed out it’s not like they’ve been beseiged by monsters during their escape run; there was just the sight of the one mega Cthulu-phant and the distant noise of perhaps another creature somewhere outside in the mist, but that’s not enough for me. After the lengths Drayton has already gone to to protect his son, I just don’t buy that he’d blow his brains out there and then. Wouldn’t you at least try to get out and walk? Wouldn’t you go as far as you possibly could on foot and only turn the gun on the one you love at the last possible moment, when all was most certainly lost?
The tragic irony at the end only happens because Drayton gave up and committed an unthinkable act far more quickly than seemed realistic, and for that reason the ending wasn’t earned and it didn’t satisfy.
Other than that I mostly really enjoyed it. I think Darabont is a terrific film-maker (Shawshank’s one of my all-time faves) and I can’t wait to see what he does with The Long Walk, which alongside The Jaunt and Survivor Type is my all-time favorite SK story. I just felt really let down by how this one worked out.
As a parent, the idea of the simple act of doing that unmentionable thing is simply impossible/unthinkable. In one instant you have shat on every year, month, day and second of protecting and cherishing that life with the pull of a trigger. And yet, maybe that is what the writer and/or director is trying to explore because they are working through parallel or similar experiences? I don’t know. Edit: Anyway, this thread is seriously distracting me from Pan’s Labyrinth which presents additional complicated parent-child issues to consider/analyze.
By the way, for a real examination of a father/son relationship in a Mist-like situation, read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Without spoiling anything, it takes a moment like the decision at the end of The Mist and makes it the basis for an unforgettable relationship. What do you do with/for a loved one when all hope really is lost? Excellent book.
-TomConsidering how I agree with Whitta on Darabont and has the same feelings for those King stories I can’t help being extremely dissapointed at what I read about The Mist.
If he knows he has only four bullets and is going to die horribly after committing his last terrible act, why don’t he give the gun to one of the others and risk looking for a new car or some gas?
Either he returns with salvation or he dies screaming and the others still get to do their murder/suicide - bonus he don’t get to kill his own kid.
It’s cool to explore a parents worst fear, but as others have said it seems like a cop out to have him give up without a final fight. Darabont could have kept the ending but had the creatures bearing down. A window breaks or a tentacle enters the car and Drayton shots everybody… then the army arrives and kills the attackers and saves Drayton who gets his ‘Noooooooo!’-moment. Still bad - but not as bad.
No, no, he’s right - The Shawshank Redemption is literally the most over-rated movie of all-time. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, because it isn’t. It just means it’s wildly over-praised.
Currently, The Shawshank Redemption is listed as the #2 highest rated movie by the users of IMDB. Let’s ignore all of the non-American movies that are a million times better than Shawshank, and stick with just American releases. Is Shawshank better than The Godfather Part II, The Good The Bad & The Ugly, Chinatown, or Pulp Fiction? Is Shawshank better than the entire filmography of Kubrick, Hitchcock, Scorcese and Orson Welles? Methinks not.
Yes, yes, yes, oh yes, yes, not if you add them up, ditto and yes.