My brother and I went and saw “The Mist” last Friday.  I’m a big Stephen King fan… stories, not necessarily movies, and I had previously ‘read’ the story on audio, which was a full cast “3D” recording that was very good.  The movie was directed by Frank Darabont, who previously did the Stephen King stories “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” both of which were very good.  So I had high hopes for the film adaptation of “The Mist.”

The Story 

I came away from the movie not really knowing how I feel.  But first thing’s first.  “The Mist” begins with a huge thunderstorm.  When the storm passes, atrist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) surveys the damage with his wife and Billy (Nathan Gamble).  His tree has crashed into his studio window, and his neighbor Brent Norton’s (Andre Braugher) tree has flattened his boathouse.  And an erie mist is coming over across the lake.  Though he and Norton had a rough past (Norton sued him and lost), they ride into town together, along with Billy, to get some supplies from the local supermarket.  While waiting to check out, a local townsman rushes in bloody, and says that something in the mist took another townsman, and the mist rolls through town and blankets everything, including the supermarket.

From there, the real story begins, as the normally civilized townsfolk try to cope with the unthinkable.  One mother leaves the store right away, worried about her kids that she left at home “for a few minutes” to run to the store.  No one will go with her.  The people trapped in the store start to split into 3 groups.  The first is the people who can’t cope with what is happening.  Even when the bag boy is cajoled into going outside to unplug the vent for the store’s generator, and is subsequently taken by huge tentacles that come out of the mist, still some store patrons don’t believe it.  They can’t imagine the unimaginable.  The leader of this group of non-believers is Norton, who thinks that Drayton is making it up to make him look like a fool, and he leads a group out into the mist.  A rope tied to one of them comes back with half the man’s torso missing… don’t need much more proof than that. 

The second group is lead by the town’s proclaimed nutjob, Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), who believes it’s God’s will and that it’s “the end of days.”  While she starts off looking like a raving lunatic, she starts to gain a following.  Night comes, and so do the bugs, huge terrifying flying creatures, attracted by light rigged up in the store.  They break trough some of the glass in the storefront and kill a few, but they are fended off.  One lands on Mrs. Carmody, but flies off leaving her unharmed, fueling her religious tirades and gaining her followers.

The third group is lead by Drayton.  These are the people who believe what they see before their eyes, and try to figure out what to do.  Some unlikely heros come from this group, from the nerdy assistant store manager Ollie (Toby Jones) to the elderly but fiesty Irene (Frances Sternhagen).  They lead a group from the supermarket to the pharmacy next store, where the horrors in the mist are racheted up a notch.  The full magnitude of what they are facing starts to become clear each time someone leaves the store.  But the horrors aren’t confined to just the mist.  Inside, Mrs. Carmody and her growing legions are conviced that God needs a sacrifice — expiation! — to keep the mist creatures at bay.  Drayton and his group make plans to try to leave in Drayton’s car before the crowds turn on them, but Mrs. Carmody confronts them before they leave. 

After a showdown in the supermarket, they leave in Drayton’s car.  They first drive to Drayton’s house, to find out the fate of his wife.  They then drive off into the mist, hoping for a way out of it before the gas tank runs dry.  When it does, they have to decide what to do, in a bitterly ironic conclusion.

Analysis

The movie adaptation of “The Mist” is pretty faithful to the novella, from what I can remember.  There are some nice touches in there, such as the artist Drayton painting a portrait of Roland from ‘The Dark Tower’ series at the beginning in his studio.  I think the novella left a little more to the imagination about what was in the mist, but overall it was pretty much as I’d pictured it.

The story is a character drama about what fear can drive people to do, how civilized people can decend into madness in an instant.  Some of this worked well in the movie and some of it didn’t.  The Norton character, for instance, seemed a little too adamant in his unbelief.  And Mrs. Carmody was perhaps a little over-the-top at times.  She was meant to be, but I think it might have been a little more effective if she was a little creepier and less boisterous.  Drayton’s kid Billy was played well by Nathan Gamble, as was Drayton himself by Thomas Jane.  Overall, the casting I think was well done, utilizing an ensemble of lesser known and character actors rather than big name (read: distracting) stars.

The ending was the only real departure from the movella.  Stephen King has highly praised the new ending, stating that “anybody who reveals the last 5 minutes of this film should be hung from their neck until dead.’  For me, that’s where my misgivings about the movie start.

——- Spoiler alert.  Highlight the text below.  ——–

The novella ended with them driving off into the mist.  They catch a snipet of words from the static of the radio, and head off in that direction, hoping to get free of the mist.  I can see maybe why Hollywood would not like such an indecicive ending.  The new ending has them running out of gas and never finding an end to the mist.  Choosing to die on their own terms, they decide to kill themselves, but the gun only has 4 bullets, and there are 5 of them.  Drayton presumably shoots the other 4, including his young son.  (The camera shows the outside of the car and you hear the shots.)  He then hears rumbling and leaves the car, calling the beasts of the mist to come take him.  But out of the mist comes not beasts, but rather an Army tank, followed by soldiers with flamethrowers and trucks full of refugees (including the mother who left the store at the beginning).  Drayton falls to his knees sobbing as the credits roll.

I don’t care for the ending at all.  I think it was a brave ending, in that Darabont could have taken the easy way out and had the five of them be rescued.  I guess I just didn’t find it all that believable.  First, I think I would have tried to stop at a gas station and to try to get more gas.  You might or might not have to face more mist creatures by doing that, but at that point what have you got to lose?  It seems more realistic than just driving until you run out.  And then if I did drive until I ran out of gas, I would think that I’d sit there until something actually attacked the car before I’d kill everyone.  These are people who faced incredible odds and braved unimaginable terrors.  They did all that for the entire length of the movie and then gave up when the car ran out of gas?  It just doesn’t seem credible.  I think it cheapened the movie, because if made the end seem like a Hollywood twist for the sake of a twist.

I’m also not sure what Darabont was trying to say by showing the mother at the beginning of the movie driving by at the end of the refugee truck.  Is she then better than Drayton, even though he was the supposed hero of the story, because she was brave enough at the beginning to step out into the mist by herself to save her kids, whereas he chose to stay in the store to try to save his?  Was it just piling irony on top of irony, that not only did he not have to shoot his son and the others in the car, but if he had left at the beginning everything would have been ok? The whole ending just left me… unsatisfied.  I don’t know, if I was the director, if I would have left the original ending from the novella in place, or done something else completely different, but I really didn’t like what Darabont chose to do.

——- End spoiler alert.  ——–

Conclusion

In the end, I thought is was a decent movie that was marred by the choices the director made at the end.  Not neary as bad as some other Stephen King adaptations, but not as good as it could have been.