I never read the novella, and first heard of the movie when I was googling for info on Cloverfield a few months back; it was one of a number that Cloverfield got compared to by viewers, with mixed reactions. It wasn’t enough to motivate me to see it at the time however, and I promptly forgot about The Mist until it showed up in our Blockbuster mail rentals a few days ago.
Although I doubt there are many people who have not yet seen it that would still be interested, I’ll throw in the mandatory disclaimer: this is full of spoilers. That said I can’t say I’d recommend this to everyone, so reading this may be preferable – for now I’ll just say that the movie is well done, but has 1-2 parts that may be a bit much even for regular horror fans...
This was a very creepy movie. I don’t like everything that I’ve seen/read from Stephen King, but he is undeniably a master of character development and of getting under the viewer’s skin, and both effects were in full throttle throughout this flick’s 2 hrs 5 minutes.
The movie’s namesake shows up rather quickly and without a lot of advance warning – you get introduced to the main character David Drayton and watch some brief character development before the cast is assembled in a supercenter (kind of a colossal general store a la Walmart), where they will be spending most of the movie trying to hold it together and keep the creepies out.
As it happens a nearby military base has been conducting experiments on ways to view and interact with other dimensions, and (surprise!) Something Went Wrong ™ (and in fine Evil Government tradition the experiments of course have to be conducted at a base near a population center).
We don’t know what exactly happened there, but it seems likely that the base wasn’t overrun all at once; among the supercenter’s refugees are 3 soldiers who had originally planned on stopping just to pick up supplies and leave town before the mist overtook them, so there was probably some initial attempts at a holding action.
The mist turns out to contain a variety of invariably nasty things; basically a collection of weird super-predators from beyond, who are mostly confounded by the tall sheets of plate glass separating them from the folks huddled inside the supercenter, only accidentally getting inside once.
Early on, the citizens learn that no one survives for more than a few seconds outside or near open doors (well almost no one – in a miraculous stroke of serendipity one woman manages to walk home and reach safety though we only learn she made it at the end of the movie), so everyone cringes together watching the mist through the windows, slowly going to pieces.
A little after darkfall, a swarm of massive dragonfly/wasp things dot the glass, attracted to the lights inside. By itself this isn’t a problem, except that these huge bugs are being hunted by man-sized pterodactyl flyers which end up cracking and then breaking the glass as they fly down to snatch their prey, and soon both species get their first taste of human.
Although most survive to see morning, this event accelerates the crowd’s descent into collective madness and causes them to merge around the town’s crazy woman Mrs. Carmody in a scenario reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Mrs. Carmody interprets the Mist as the biblical Armageddon, and doesn’t have to work very hard to sell the idea to her terrified co-refugees.
One thing I do want to say on this – a lot of the reviews I’ve read of this movie are careful to mention that the reviewers found the people scarier than the monsters. Come on. I know it’s cool to do the I’ve seen the enemy and it is US thing, but seriously, while I do agree it would be quite alarming to be stuck amidst a mob of desperate hysterical people like this, I have to say I’d take the lot of them over a nest of tentacles wetly splitting open to reveal hissing, vertical mouths lined with fangs, and I suspect most anyone else would too were they faced with the situation. I mean there’s a reason why these people are sticking together and not running outside to escape eachother and take their chances with the monsters – it’s because the monsters are frickin’ scary, and not merely in a metaphorical sense.
Anyway, before long the scared mob has turned angry and begins arranging human sacrifices under Carmody’s direction, in an effort to appease the things in the mist (never mind that this is set in Maine where most if not all of the people in the store would be familiar with the idea that leaving food outside just attracts large predators).
As a result Drayton finally feels compelled to lead the last few Independent Thinkers away from the frothing herd in a last dash for safety, killing Mrs. Carmody and losing a few of their own to outside critters in the process, and ultimately making a triumphant drive by the storefront windows in the hero’s Range Rover as the others look on in slack jawed despair like so many cavemen whose last carefully hoarded ember has extinguished in the rain.
We get to see the state of the countryside in the mist’s aftermath – giant spiders have everything webbed and cocooned, including Drayton’s wife who he left at home in the beginning of the movie. Strange hoots and grunts sound in the mist, and at one point a towering six legged thing slowly stomps past, not noticing their tiny car below.
This is the point where I’m told the novella ended at – a scene of uncertainty amidst sprawling tragedy, ruin, desolation and general monstrosity. Unfortunately screenwriter/director Frank Darabont chose to extend it a few scenes farther, following Drayton’s rover until it runs out of gas – he and his passengers then agree that he should mercy kill them with the remaining four bullets in his revolver.
Including his young son, who has just awoken from a shock induced nap.
This accomplished, Drayton has no bullet left for himself and must nerve himself up to leave the car and wait for the nearest creepy-crawly to make a lunch out of him.
It is not to be however, as the US military chooses that moment to make a grand entrance with tank treads rolling and flamethrowers blazing – too late for Drayton’s son and fellow travelers though, in a parting attempt at Hitchcockian irony. Or something.
This is what I was getting at when I said not everyone is going to be glad they saw this movie; it wasn’t that the director chose to sacrifice a small child for gruesome effect – after all this is a “horror” film, not merely a “thriller”, and so this scene is therefore not (quite) out of bounds even if it is a tasteless kidney punch.
There were two material reasons why I hated this ending. Number one, it makes the last two hours of grueling struggle for survival seem almost silly when the military can abruptly show up, fan away the mist and casually wipe out all the baddies that previously had seemed so hopelessly insurmountable – you can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic blaring away in the background as the Good Guys arrive and save the day in true B movie fashion.
Number two and even more importantly though – to end the movie with the military so supremely dominant is to all but deny the possibility of a sequel, at least one with anything approaching the same level of epic scale; if the army can smush these bugs so easily, then no critters will be left for a sequel save those that managed to find a basement or abandoned warehouse to hide in, which is still creepy but not the kind of pervasive miasma of dread that is the brand of The Mist.
This by the way gets at one of my pet peeves with Hollywood; the sense that movies must start in the here and now, and must end there as well, or as near as possible - you just can't burden the viewer with either the sense that the movie's events might have sweeping and long term effects (too scary even for a horror movie I guess), or with having to pick up part 2 where the story left off at the end of part 1. In the novella, the world (seemingly) ended, and stayed that way - in the movie, we just had a Close Call.
Although the talk of dimensions and the mist’s origins were very brief and vague, they (along with the mostly unique and slimy appearance of the monsters of course) did a great deal to support the sense that this movie was a kind of Cthulhoid feature – literally small town folk being menaced by extra-dimensional horrors. I don’t know why but I find those sort of movies strangely appealing, and so The Mist was a bit of a treat for me even while I was pretty much constantly wincing in anticipation of the next critter pounce; so it was that much more annoying to me to have the door slammed on the idea at the end – particularly after the book itself apparently did such a good job of setting the stage for further adventures.
Personally I would have liked to know more about the nature of the experiments that opened the portal onto the other dimension, and even a bit about what was on the other side; I pictured a crazy jungle world of titanic proportion (hence all the mist flowing through - I'm picturing something like the jungle in King Kong 2005 but on steroids), teeming with all manner of nasty flora and fauna struggling to eat and not be eaten.
The sequel practically writes itself; Drayton's crew could pick up a lone survivor who turns out to be one of the scientists from the base, a ghost of a woman stricken by her conscience and who convinces them their only hope is to help her get to the heart of the dragon’s lair and close the portal. It would give us a look at the aftermath at the base, and a chance to see more critters – maybe some new ones… not to mention the portal itself, sure to be a pretty dramatic sight.
The scientist could be a "xenobiologist" whose job was to study and catalogue the different life forms on the other side of the portal; maybe she was married to one of the other scientists on the team, and had misgivings about the whole idea but ultimately went along with it. Her survival in the aftermath could then have come from a combination of insights into how to evade the critters by staying in their "blind spots" and perhaps some bits of sophisticated lab tech she was able to grab on the way out (whose batteries would now be very low on juice), and so she would be a source of specialized info on the gribblies in the mist, which would provide Drayton with the tools to take a more aggressive role in Mist 2, as well as providing some info for the audience's morbid curiosity; what exactly are all these freaky claws, fangs, tentacles, toxins and other random appendages etc evolved in response to? If they're going to go to so much trouble to make these critters original why not share some of the details with the viewers?
But no. All that potential gets tossed aside in favor of a Really Clever Twist to ring in the credits. The other 95% of the movie was good, but this was one time when a movie suffered from a lack of cut scenes, as though the Director decided he was going to show those know-nothings in marketing and swap in the “director’s cut” for mass release at the last second. Or maybe everyone on set thought it was a good idea to tack on the new ending.
Which is a scary thought.
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