The Mist

I just saw Frank Darabont's latest Stephen King adaptation, about small-town Mainers trapped in a supermarket while a monster-riddled mist - accidentally unleashed when a military experiment opens a portal to a Lovecraftian dimension - rolls over the world. The movie is basically a glorified Twilight Zone episode, but in an era when the horror genre is dominated by torture-porn one-upsmanship, there's something refreshing about a monster movie that traffics in Rod Serling-style social commentary, even if it runs toward heavy-handedness at times. (With the Twilight Zone comparison in mind, I'd be very curious to see Darabont's black-and-white version; if nothing else, the film's low-budget special effects might look a lot cooler than they did in color.)

That said, whether you give the film a thumbs-up or thumbs-down probably depends on what you think of the brutal twist ending, which departs significantly from the King novella. Spoilers follow ...

The King story ends with the escapees from the supermarket - the hero, David Drayton, his pre-teen son and three others - driving southward into an uncertain future. The film ends with Drayton's car running out of gas deep in the mist, with no hope of rescue; Drayton has a gun with four bullets in it, and he ends up shooting his fellow passengers, including his son, to spare them being devoured by the monstrosities all around them. Sobbing and screaming, Drayton staggers out into the mist, cryng out for the monsters to come kill him, at which point there's a roaring sound and a huge shape looms up out of the fog - and then resolves into a column of tanks, which is followed by trucks carrying refugees (including a woman who fled the supermarket early on, in search of her children; her kids are with her on the truck) and soldiers in gas masks carrying flamethrowers. In other words, Drayton shot his own son five minutes before they would have been rescued.

I can imagine someone judging this a pointlessly vicious twist, but I would describe it instead as pointedly vicious: As Aintitcoolnews' Moriarty has noted, The Mist and Darabont's career-making, super-uplifting adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption both make the same point, about the necessity of hope in hopeless situations; it's just that Shawshank is out to show us what can happen when you keep hope alive, and The Mist wants to rub our faces in what can happen when you don't. It's brutal, yes, but unlike many shocker endings it isn't just designed to show how clever the filmmakers are, and how easily they can jerk the audience around. Rather, it's intended to hammer home the movie's larger point, about the seductions to which the human mind falls prey - the seductions of scientism and hyper-rationalism, which motivated the military experiments that let the Mistworld into ours in the first place; the seductions of religious fanaticism, which comes to dominate the huddled, frightened crowd in the supermarket; and finally the seductions of despair.

On a less high-minded note, I also liked the ending because I'm an irredeemable dork who gets annoyed at the way monster movies and alien-invasion movies tend to depict the American military as essentially helpless against creatures from another world, with some deus ex machina our only hope of salvation. Obviously, this helplessness is a necessary plot device as much as anything, but I always tend to think that if a huge monster showed up in New York City, or alien tripods starting stalking the East Coast, we'd find a way to take them down. So it was nice to see a monster movie where the U.S. military gets to win one, for a change.

Comments

I quite agree with your last paragraph. And if they don't win, at least let them put up a half decent fight. One-sided battles get old fast.

Posted by Greg Sanders | March 31, 2008 1:34 PM

I think that's why "Independence Day", for all its schlock, was popular: the plucky good guys won in the end. Dunno if the Mac virus was a deus ex machina.

Posted by Klug | March 31, 2008 1:39 PM

I just finished reading both plot summaries on Wikipedia. (I read the book last week; I haven't seen the movie.)

Was there the weird sex scene in the movie? I thought that was one of the stranger parts of the book, to be honest.

Posted by Klug | March 31, 2008 2:04 PM

Klug: I think it was, but it was mitigated by the fact that it had some origin in tech the U.S. had captured, still required use of the army, and was based on one of the heroes skills.

For more examples, the TV Trope Redshirt Army is relevant.

Posted by Greg Sanders | March 31, 2008 2:09 PM

Considering that the military did not do much planning for counter-insurgency fighting until we were in the midst of one, it's probably best if we start thinking now about how to take out huge alien monsters and alien tripods. Certainly seems like another good reason for missile defense.

Posted by Geoff G | March 31, 2008 3:19 PM

No, they took the weird adultery subplot out when they converted it to a movie. I think that's a good thing.

And I do agree that the ending was pointedly vicious, not pointlessly so.

Posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax | March 31, 2008 3:51 PM

On a less high-minded note, I also liked the ending because I'm an irredeemable dork who gets annoyed at the way monster movies and alien-invasion movies tend to depict the American military as essentially helpless against creatures from another world, with some deus ex machina our only hope of salvation.

What is interesting is that in the original War of the Worlds novel (the H.G. Wells book on which all these adaptations were based) showed the (British) military as hopelessly outmatched, they were not helpless. They took down three of the tripods; one with artillery, two with the battleship Thunder Child. In fact, the latter prevented the Martians from invading France

Posted by Glaivester | March 31, 2008 9:01 PM

This is somewhat reminiscent of the ending of the original Night of the Living Dead where the army shows up at dawn and puts down the zombies, but they also shoot the lone survivor from the farmhouse.

Posted by JonF | April 1, 2008 8:21 PM