Movie Review: The Mist

Stephen King’s The Mist (3/5 stars)

When I saw the previews for this movie on TV, I thought “meh... another ‘scary’ movie I’ll probably never see”. But when I read the official review on the Strib website, it was brought to my attention that Frank Darabont directed this film. He's most known for graciously adapting two Stephen King novels into films, being The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Right then, my expectations and desire to see this film (in theaters) greatly expanded.

However - yes, there's a 'however'... sad, huh... the movie was not even worth the $5 twilight show. It started out curiously, but twenty minutes into the film, they showed the first instinctual, blood-thirsty creature. Now, if you're going to make a film with this creepy mist where you can't see an inch in front of your nose, obviously one should take advantage of this situation to scare the sanity out of people, and let their minds come up with what's killing the characters off (regardless of the novel). But once this [opposite of "scary" word here], poorly-executed, CGI monster showed up, I knew from then on that the movie would be a disappointment.

I have not read the book, mind you, nor have I ever finished any Stephen King novel, but from the Netflix reviews online, people say that the ending of the book is definitely not as appalling as the ending of this movie. Without giving anything away, I will say that I did enjoy the unexpected turn of events. The main criticism is that it was for shock-value - a Hollywood ploy to make the film more dramatically enticing. But by the time you reach the end of this film, you'll be aching for an incredibly out-of-character moment, that it'll be hard NOT to appreciate. This movie runs a little over 2 hours long, but I never felt the need for a bathroom break. Yet, there are a lot of painfully slow dialogues between characters, and I felt a strong desire to yell at them to get over it and move on with the show.

The plot of this film is human nature in the midst of something supernatural - something King-readers (or viewers) will understand. You’re more afraid of what's happening inside the store, where a large group of townspeople are trapped, more so than the invisible, instant-death-giving creatures outside. Humans pitted against other humans in times of survival-induced stress really demonstrate the vast differences in personality, and what odd reality the less stable-minded people will conjure up. Of course, for these peoples' unfortunate luck, the town's hypocritical, 'god-speaks-through-me' religious-fanatic is inside the store as well. Played irritatingly beautiful by Marcia Gay Harden, you will literally stand up and cheer when something ultimately 'bad' happens to her (for a moment, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen at all!). The rest of the actors are not well-known, which creates a great mystery of who will live and who will die.

The creatures themselves are actually quite intriguing, sans the first one they show which I mentioned earlier. Their faces are subtle mimics of our skulls, and according to ONE line in the movie (with no back-story), they come from an alternate dimension. I deduce that these monsters are in a 'Jurassic' stage of their evolution, as their sizes range from four-foot long insects to ginormously-tall 'striders' (think brontosaurus, but with long legs instead of neck). I was highly interested in understanding the creatures' origins, as they are the reason the mist has arrived (and why the mist in the first place?); but the movie gives us no other explanation, besides their appearance being the military’s fault. I suppose I'll have to read the book, eh? :)

Overall, I give it three out of five stars. The script was stretched-out to the point of being unrealistic, the dialogue ran long and dry, and the CGI in one part of the film was terrible (these days, poor CGI doesn't cut it, even if it's only five minutes of the movie). I did enjoy the IDEA of survivalist-tension between groups of characters in the store, but it wasn’t executed very well. The ending was nicely unexpected, but not enough to make me watch the film ever again, or recommend it.