Rating of
3/4
Chills Inside and Outside The Mist
Chris Kavan - wrote on 11/25/07
Adapting Stephen King novels to the big screen has always been a hit or miss proposition – mostly miss. However, one man who has had success with the master of horror has been Frank Darabont, scoring a knockout with The Shawshank Redemption and a noble attempt with The Green Mile. One thing that both of those have in common is that neither of them is an actual horror story from King. The Mist, on the other hand, is supposed to be scary.
Darabont proves that he can do horror – especially tension and suspense – with the same emotion he gave The Shawshank Redemption. The horrors in this story are twofold: there are the monsters trying to get to a group of people trying to survive, then there are the real monsters – the survivors themselves. It’s not a new concept – a diverse group of people thrown together in a normal place (in this case a grocery store) while a horrifying event keeps them from escaping (in this case an impenetrable mist teeming with other-worldly, and hungry, creatures).
All your favorites characters are here: caring father and his son, the new single woman in town, local religious nut (played to perfection by Marcia Gay Harden), big biker dude, local redneck, military guy and his should-have-been high-school sweetheart, nerdy grocer / marksman, the old lady with attitude – there are more, but you get the picture. With so many characters, there isn’t much room for development, although watching most people devolve into a religious cult it done quite well.
On the other end of the story are the creatures. There are better designs out there, but for the most part, I think they turned out pretty good. They looked enough like existing creatures that it wasn’t much of stretch to think they could have come from an alternate dimension. This mist itself makes a pretty good monster – sometimes not seeing what’s out there is better than finding out.
The best part of The Mist is how faithful it stays to the original source material. Some changes had to made – the ambiguous ending has been replaced by one that is far more optimistic, yet far more depressing, than the original. If that sounds wrong, watch it for yourself. If you’ve read the original, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Overall, despite the lack of character development, The Mist is filled with plenty of tension – both from what’s coming in from the outside and what’s happening on the inside. But a bit of advice – if you happen to be trapped with a diverse group of people, including a religious nut, make sure you have plenty of rope and duct tape.
