Mist-y Water Colored Memories

I wasn't doing this back around Thanksgiving when The Mist first came out in theater which is too bad because I could have vented the anger and rage that The Mist invoked in me here. Instead, I was forced to take it out on society. Mind you, my way of taking it out on society was mainly confined to saying, "What's good about it?" when people would say, "Good morning," to me. Not that it's coming out on DVD, I can now purge from my psyche the demons it left and heal the damage it did to me.

The Mist is, quite simply, one of the worst movies ever made. A lot of people didn't like The Mist but what truly amazes me is that they don't hate it for the reason I hated it. Many critics cited things like wooden acting, needless gore, characters doing stupid things for stupid reasons and the other usual laundry list you can cite for hating most big budget Hollywood films. It even made the right wing hit list because one of the main antagonists is a Christian nutjob whose usual end-of-the-world rhetoric doesn't sound so crazy when the world actually seems to be ending and because all the bad stuff in the movie is caused by a failed military experiment and this was looked down upon by people who fetishize the US military. Yet all of the reviews I read either barely mentioned the ending or went into a bit only to quickly dismiss it so they could concentrate on the other things they didn't like about the movie and the ending is the reason to hate The Mist. The rest of the movie could have been comparable to Citizen Kane but, if it had the same ending, it would still earn the contempt of the world. The ending of The Mist is something that H.P. Lovecraft would have described as, "having risen from the stygian depths, its very nature evil, its very existence blasphemous and its very presence an affront to the world of light, sanity and reason." I am not exaggerating. The ending of The Mist is indeed that bad.

To get to the ending, let's explore the beginning and middle so the ending makes sense. Ok, already I'm wrong since the ending of The Mist makes no sense whatsoever, but let's go back a bit anyway.

The plot is more or less faithful to the Stephen King story it was based on (up until the godawful ending). A fierce storm in a rural Main town causes damage at a local military base where, rumor says, strange experiments are being conducted. This realeases a thick, otherworldly mist that is occupied by all sorts of vicious, demony beasties who trap several of the townsfolk in a local supermarket including author Davids Drayton, played here y Thomas Jane. They don't fare that badly once they figure out and apply certain rules like, "Staying inside where there are no beasts capable of tearing a person into tiny pieces is preferable to going outside where there are loads of creatures like that." They do well, that is, until people actually begin to take seriously a woman previously regarded as the town kook. Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) has an obvious paranoid mental disorder that she expresses through Christian extremism and apocalyptic rhetoric that, as I said before, usually gets ignored but takes on a new meaning when the Apocalypse may actually be happening. As more and more of the supermarket dwellers are swayed to her way of thinking and words like, "human sacrifice," begin to get thrown around, Drayton and his allies try to come up with a plan to escape the store before Mrs. Carmody forms her own megachurch.

This will sound odd, but I actually liked The Mist up till this point. Oh, it wasn't particularly great or memorable, especially surprising since it was helmed by Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont, but it was mildly entertaining and up until the end, I could have gone blissfully through my life never thinking about it again.

Oh dear, I suppose now I must deal with the ending. I've gone back and forth as to whether I should reveal the ending here and have decided not to. In fact, I just got done deleting the paragraph where I spoiled the whole thing. What I will say now is that, if you ever see the ending, you will wish that the movie had balls so you could kick them again and again. You will want to slap Frank Darabont over and over in a way that you haven't wanted to slap a director since Gus Van Sant thought it would be a good idea to remake Psycho. You will wonder how anyone could have thought it was a good idea to take Stephen King's original ending, an ambiguous piece of work that finished the story on notes of both mystery and hope, and change it into something that makes you think that now is the time for humans to step aside and give rule of the planet over to its new cockroach overlords.

Or, to quote a teenage girl who sat a few rows in front me, "THAT SUCKED!" That pretty much sums it up.

UPDATE: A commenter has called me out on the ending saying I have to post it. Ok, got a nice little spoiler space (I couldn't make the code work that turns text invisible) so just scroll down if you want to see it.



















In King's original ending, Drayton, his son and a few others from the store drive into the mist. They heard a stray radio signal mention Hartford, Connecticut and bank everything on the slim hope that maybe the mist has stopped its spread there. In the movie's ending, Drayton, his son and a few others from the store are still driving along until they run out of gas. Drayton has a gun and decides that a shot to the head is preferable to whatever the creatures in the mist have in store so he shoots everyone, including his own son. Not having a bullet left for himself, he exits the SUV and shouts, "COME AND GET ME!" Just then, the mist lifts and reveals a military rescue caravan meaning that all the murders he had just committed were, in fact, the stupid idea that everyone in the theater knew that they were. It ends with Drayton kneeling in the road screaming next to the blood-and-gore-filled SUV. Now that I've had to relive all that, I have to go punch something.