Today has been a day for doing back and forths via blogs, so I’ll continue the trend. Here’s a review of The Mist by my good buddy, Bill, and below is my rebuttal review. It goes without saying that the spoilers will fly.
You’re wrong about this one, Bill.
Hold on, back up a bit.
You’re wrong and you’re right, a complicated mix of both, just like this movie is a complicated mix of two things.
Okay, let’s do it from the top.
You pretty much get it in the penultimate closing paragraph of your review, it’s Twilight Zone territory - that parallel when combined with the TV-movie aesthetic that was partly stylistic, mostly budgetarily-constrained, works pretty well to give you an idea of what Darabont was trying to achieve. A throwback horror; back when it was simple and hokey, the scares came thick and fast, people did dumb shit and the yokels usually got eaten, the crazy fanatics get theirs in the end and the mild-mannered leading man’s determination wins the slow and steady race.
Except he doesn’t win, so much as get close to the finish line, stumble, scrape his knees on the way down to the tarmac and after he’s been run over by all the other runners, his wounds get infected, as septicemia sets in he looks up and sees his girlfriend getting raped by his worst enemy, then maybe shooting the beloved family dog. This is King we’re talking about, after all. Uplifting flicks from a guy like King, such as Shawshank, are few and far between. It’s almost unfair that Darabont has that movie in his CV, because it skews what people think of him as a film-maker.
You know me, I’m a horrendous geek when it comes to knowing about production and so on, I’m one of those queer people who often adores movie adaptations OVER the original written works, and in the case of King’s movies, it’s doubly true 99% of the time. I know that in this case, Darabont had earmarked the script for The Mist some twenty years ago and then when he was gathering steam in the industry, Shawshank fell in his lap before he got the chance to do The Mist. And while it is probably the high point of his career, Darabont’s heart (and roots) has always been in horror; if you dig a little at IMDB, he’s got writing credits for The Blog, The Fly II, Tales From The Crypt, Nightmare on Elm Street III. Pretty goddamn hokey. Darabont was said to draw parallels between his script for The Mist and a Twilight Zone episode titled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”.
And it’s also those roots that stay true to most of King’s stories: simple, hokey horror tales that are usually elevated by the characters, even if his endings often undo the good will you have endeared towards him as an author. However, King is lucky to have someone like Darabont (and some of the others that have adapted his work over the years) to understand the strengths and yet curtail King’s vice and true weakness: excess. The man never knows when to say when, he often goes over the top in that hokey, schlock way and offs half his cast without even thinking about it.
Yet that sounds eerily familiar in the context of The Mist, doesn’t it? That’s where Darabont’s comes to the rescue yet again, in this case it wasn’t about suppressing King’s excesses but realising this was the perfect place for them to roam free. Where but in an end-of-the-world scenario does it make sense for a large proportion of your cast to be murdered in ultimately meaningless and increasingly horrible ways? While I haven’t read the original story, I’ve gleaned enough from the internet to understand how it differs from the movie version we both saw and to give you that ending for the purpose of discussion - imagine if when the group that piled into the jeep had been tottering along the road they’d had a CB radio that picked up the whispered transmission of a nearby town and you’d seen them drive off into the mist, hopeful, not knowing whether or not they were going to make it. That sucks, right? I mean, I hope I’m not alone in thinking that sucks for the movie that we saw. Part of what I love about the adaptive process is where people nail what the author maybe got wrong and interestingly in this case, King himself commented on loving the changes to the ending.
So what exactly are the problems with The Mist, because it sure isn’t a perfect movie?
Well, setting your sights low so that you don’t disappoint is always a dubious measure of success, especially for a filmmaker as established as Darabont. And he almost misses the mark with this flick, the first half hour damn near kills it; awkward dialogue, stilted characterisation and hammy acting, not to mention dodgy hybrids of CG and animatronics. Not exactly high drama from Darabont, but then, it is meant to be a hokey sci-fi horror… but again, I’m not comfortable using the defence “well I wasn’t trying to make a great movie”. And in the cinema I was seriously doubting that this movie was going to work for me, because even at my most generous, I’m not exactly a huge fan of B-movie horror.
However, I really feel that once the slow creep of fear and the claustrophobic confines of the supermarket make themselves felt that the film really comes to life through some condensed and concise character work. In some ways you’re right, Bill, the conversion of the scared yet sceptical locals into rabid, burning pitch fanatics is pretty damn fast but I think it works in the context of the movie. I felt like there were enough clashes between the opposing forces to justify the rather extreme, climactic face-off .
In that second act, where the people polarise into the two groups and the whole Lord of the Flies vibe starts to pulse in the air, provides much of the meat of the movie’s subtext and I loves me some subtext. There weren’t exactly subtle metaphors at play, but the allusions to post 9-11 America probably aren’t immediate to some - the controling power of fear and abuse through religion is as indicting a charge thrown at Bush as you’ll get outside of a Keith Olbermann monologue.
So then what do we have? A clunky first act that improves towards a second act with some decent characterisation, a building atmosphere of tension and enough splatter elements to keep the gore fiends happy, and then what? A sucker-punch ending, after the brief satisfaction of watching the real enemy of the trapped people in the supermarket go down we get the soul-crushing depths of Darabont’s take on King’s Universe. It’s not enough that these people have seen the frenzied depths that humanity can plumb when put under pressure - and that can’t be understated, the ugly reveal of the prejudices, fears and perceived injustices that lurk behind the everyday masks, like the rotten insect-riddled corpses waiting beyond the friendly facade of the drugstore, is pretty scary even for a blood-splattered B-movie - but then they have to face an almost decidedly futile escape effort, not certain if their course of action is the most true or even righteous. And we know how it ends, at least we agree on that - but for me the ending elevates what is a decent B-movie horror with some good character work and reasonable subtext.
Consider your review rebutted … in the butt.