Opening Day: 24th January 2008

OUR REVIEW OF THE ORIGINAL STORY BY STEPHEN KING

Synopsis:

David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) are among alarge group of terrified townspeople trapped in a local grocery store by a strange, otherworldly mist. David is the first to realize that there are things lurking in the mist…deadly, horrifying things…creatures not of this world. Survival depends on everybody in the store pulling together…but is that possible, given human nature? As reason crumbles in the face of fear and panic, David begins to wonder what terrifies him more: the monsters in the mist—or the ones inside the store, the human kind, the people that until now had been his friends and neighbors?

Movie Review:

The Mist is unbelievably bad its shameful. When I see The Mist register a 70 percent on Rotten Tomatoes I despair. Maybe I wrapped a scarf around my head and wept. I am a big fan of The Green Mile and I respect Darabont for The Shawshank Redemption but The Mist is one of the most obscene cases of blind, obnoxious track-record worshipping ever. Darabont screwed The Mist. Period. It is near impossible to justify a script and screenplay so blinkered and bigoted, so naively abysmal that its plays worse than a B-grade horror that everyone uses to justify its existence. Even standard B-grade fare produce relatively brainless fare with intellectual understanding of their own intent and purpose. The Mist tries so hard to be preachy, scary, sophisticated the only scary thing is how someone could achieve so little with so much at hand. (In Darabont's case, a seemingly proven talent, creativity and movie magic inspiration.)

The Mist had no characters in the film. Really. The "characters" were such horrendous caricatures they were literally stand up cardboard figures with name tags like "guy with a huge chip on shoulder" or "stupid, shrieking bimbotic female" on them. In fact they were so real and life-like I for a moment feared a grey haired cardboard collecting auntie would trundle in, box them in, fold them up and cart them away to the nearest recycling centre. A man runs into the supermarket, blood stained, amidst a spreading mist and shrieking voices of death and despair, warning the trapped townsfolk of the impending pestilence, death and decay. Sounds like a good start to story? Yeah.

Yeah right.

Barely hours later, stereotyped alpha male blue collared workers work up a fit when the lead caricature David Drayton annoys them by telling them not to go out. Yes. "Don't think 'cos you're educated" tripe takes centrestage as they insist on going out of the supermarket to fix, of all things, a choked vent of a generator that's smoking. Worse still, the generator, turned off by the lead caricature a few minutes prior and it shut down the lights to...the storeroom. Yes. non even the entire supermarket. I.e. useless generator. That's the kind of conversation, scripting and lines that will permeate the entire movie. David's lawyer neighbour blows up accusing him of lying about monsters in order to get back at a lawsuit that he filed against David. What? Yeah go figure.

David holds lights to the supermarket glass at night and tons of gigantic bugs flutter to the glass and tries to break them. After glass almost and eventually breaks, caricature declares - "they're attracted to light!"

You want cheap horror? In a bid to find weapons to fend off the monsters, one man goes to a truck to retrieve a shotgun. A rope is tied to him as he walks, only for it to fly into the air as he is chomped up by the monsters. Guess what? "Hero" pulls the rope back to supermarket, only to see lower torso. Every one screams. Hero continues pulling. Everyone screams louder. Maybe hero wants a better view. Continues pulling.

Ms. Carmody, the prophecy spewing "Christian" takes the cake in the movie. Her character is so insensitively offensive it is almost hate inducing. Portrayed to insanely annoying levels by Marcia Gay Harden, she embodies all the "stereotyped" nuances of modern Pentecostal evangelists it takes up a good three quarter chunk of the movie.The attempted religious undertones, possibly speaking out against George Bush's religiously slanted war-mongering (Darabont admits speaking out against modern America) were so poorly developed, crassly portrayed that it bordered on irresponsibility and irrationality. The movie was an extravagant indulgence of misplaced plot devices, sequences and terrible storytelling. Imagine this - the character was so bad that members of the audience were deviating towards anti-Christian cursings and the entire theatre roared in cheers and applauded when the woman is confronted by the "good guys in the movie". Is this the social commentary Darabont wanted to achieve?

Cheesy special effects, music, horribly laughable attempts at suspense, emotions are the bane of the entire movie. The last 15 minutes of the film were utter tripe and cinematographic shame. If not for the fact that I would be banished to spoilerville if i attempted to criticise the obscenely atrocious and abysmal attempts at passing this off as a movie, I would have ripped it to shreds. Mercilessly. Like this ridiculously bug looking things did to the caricatures in the movie.

I write this out of sadness rather than anger. Darabont? I don't quite know what happened to basic film sensibilities when a movie like The Mist can be given any semblance of plaudits. If you think scripting and directing that spits in the face of the simple rule of "show not tell", one that shows you how not to make a thoughtful film fills your cinematic hunger, then by all means feast on the visual diarrhoea of Darabont. Otherwise, with the exception of it being decently budget (decently budgeted, not decent) film production quality that at least trudges from start to finish, The Mist is one show I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Or anything.

Movie Rating:

(The Mistake, a sample of cinematic atrocity)

Review by Daniel Lim