I caught the film adaptation of the Stephen King novella, The Mist, a couple weeks ago after much anticipation and a blog post back in May. This story, after all, was the first thing I remember reading from King plus it inspired the game Half-Life many years later. Although I didn’t have a chance to re-read the story prior to the screening as I’d hoped, I remembered quite a bit of the story from many years ago. And from my memory the film held pretty true to the book – except for the interesting, but heavy-handed ending they tacked onto the end. Without giving anything away, the filmmakers decided to answer more questions than the original did. For a creepy story rooted in a lack of information, having answers and resolution provided at the end just felt all wrong.
By far this is director Frank Darabont’s weakest King adaptation. Of course it will take a miracle to pull off one better than Shawshank and The Green Mile. But it wasn’t bad either. Surprisingly, the visual effects didn’t disappoint as in so many other King movies. I went in with the attitude that’d we’d be best entertained by seeing very little of what’s in the mist, and if they had to show us, well, they better bring it. And they did. You practically can’t impress an audience anymore in this post-LOTR era, but the cgi has to be believable, else it’s a distraction. In this flick, all the baddies from big to enormous were done quite well.
In this film, it was the flatness of the characters that left this movie short of the others in Darabont’s resume. There just wasn’t much character development throughout the movie – characters were introduced quickly, and what you saw is what you got. Most fulfilled their very typical roles, and few had any kind of arc. Really the only development you see are stereotypical characters becoming bigger and more exaggerated caricatures of themselves…the bible thumper, the reluctant hero, the uppity out-of-towner, the town yokels, etc. In fairness I think Darabont didn’t have much to draw from – the simple characters worked fine in the short(ish) story, but on film where less is left to the imagination their shallowness was too obvious. Still, there’s plenty of action to keep things moving, and I personally managed to quickly forget the bits of dialog that were either lifeless or way over the top.
Overall it’s a fun watch. I just hope when Darabont takes on King’s The Long Walk, he returns to his old self and knocks one out of the park.
Tags: Movies
