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I've read that it changes from

Spoiler

"they drive away in the mist the end"

to

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"he shoots his kid so he doesn't have to suffer...and then the army comes through the trees and shock horror the end".

Sort of an obvious kind of ending to tack on there, to be honest. I hope this movie is a horrible, horrible, horrible flop so I can make it in thirty years, but I also want it to be the best Steven King movie since The Shining.

Also, everyone needs to go find and check out the "3-D SOUND!" audiobook version of the story. Some parts are horrible ("dyaaad! dyaaad! whgjhaat's haaaappenninggg?"), but some parts are fantastic.

Fake edit: The cinematography looks like it's going to be terrible during the conversations (BIG FACES!), but fantastic during the noisier sequences.

New trailer.

Just got back. Very, very good. One of the best Stephen King horror adaptations, right up there with The Shining and The Dead Zone. Well-directed, the cinematography was very fitting to the movie. I loved the feel of the colors and lighting; I'm tired of slick-looking film, to be honest with you.

There were a couple issues. One was the beginning of the movie, which was oddly abrupt. If we'd had maybe another minute with the characters, it would have been better. I also didn't like the music towards the end, which starts off as an organ note, which is fine in itself, but then the wailing Arabic woman kicks in.

Overall, really good. 9/10.

Good, good film. There was a moment - see if you can guess - where nearly everyone in the theatre cheered, and I actually choked up a little in surprised pride at them for doing so. Good for them for cheering! I'm usually not fond of the audience, but I was tonight.

I liked it a lot (and had read the novella, years ago, btw). Didn't much care for the (abundantly fake-lookin') CGI or the (too selfconsciously archetypal, deaths-heady) design of the monsters, but the human elements are handled so well, and it's such a, errrm, thematically interesting film to inject into the current body politic (with it's rather provocative take on religious fundamentalism, say) that I can't but enthusiastically get behind it. Go, Mist!

The spoiler about the ending change above is accurate, btw. It's much more, uh, thought-provoking.

Oh: re: Dreamcatcher, I actually am delighted at the idea of having monsters that come out of your asshole! It's PERFECT!

P.

Such a frustrating ending to one of the best horror movies I've seen in a while.

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It's so obvious, such a cliche - a direct rip of the end of Shaun of the Dead, which was parodying end-of-the-world films. There are so many wonderful moments leading up to the last few minutes where it could have ended with dignity and respect for the characters. Even after the shots are fired, fade to the mist. Anything but a GOTCHA ending with the good guys rolling in so everything that just happened was wasted.

miloauckerman wrote:

Spoiler

It's so obvious, such a cliche - a direct rip of the end of Shaun of the Dead, which was parodying end-of-the-world films. There are so many wonderful moments leading up to the last few minutes where it could have ended with dignity and respect for the characters. Even after the shots are fired, fade to the mist. Anything but a GOTCHA ending with the good guys rolling in so everything that just happened was wasted.

If you think the ending was a ripoff of that film, I think you completely misunderstood the etymology for the entire basis of BOTH films.

Thematic spoiler! (Maybe spoiler of another sort)

Actually, I liked the ending, but only on reflection; at first I was quite put off. But throughout the film, we're judging people for making the wrong move, but it's always the OTHER that's wrong; we're okay, the viewer and the characters we're identifying with. Finally, we're led down the path of makin' the wrong move ourselves - despairing when we should be holding out. In an odd way, it's even comforting to be told that it's never the right time to give up hope: it's just not very comforting for our main character.

Or his kid.[/

P.

miloauckerman wrote:

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Military-shows-world's-OK-folks! is only a little better than 'it was all a dream' or a Village-like 'just kidding folks!' finale. Absolute betrayal of everything we'd seen before.

You still completely missed the point of the story. Whether or not the film was any good, it was the choices made at the end that defined the resolution. The betrayal you speak of has absolutely nothing to do with the story and is just a plot device by which to frame the error of that choice.

It's not worth arguing about the ending of this movie when everything that goes before it is such utter crap. Poor Marcia Gay Harden, I hope she finds her way back to good films. Oh shit, next she's making the Thomas Kinkade biopic. Maybe that character won't be a two dimensional audience masturbation device.

You still completely missed the point of the story.

Or, as I said, "the point of the story" (as you contend it to be) was laughably banal and doesn't justify a complete reversal of competent storytelling.

miloauckerman wrote:"the point of the story" (as you contend it to be) was laughably banal and doesn't justify a complete reversal of competent storytelling.

Oh, I don't know about thaaaaaaaaaat. I thought it was a pretty well-made siege picture. The precedent isn't Shaun of the Dead, which of course the King novella precedes by, oh, two decades or so, it's RiofuckingBravo (though if you wanna get technical about the affinities of the ending, well, okay, it's Night of the Living Dead).

As far as the "point of the story," what's the point of a siege picture? Well, it's a bit of us against them, and sometimes us against us, which this is clearly invoking. It's left vs. right, faith vs. pragmatism, military vs. civilian, townies vs. out-of-towners, educated vs. underachievers, it's all of those things (America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing). I think it's entirely laudable that Darabont chose to dramatize this -- fairly utterly stagebound material that takes place almost entirely in one set, with a cast of forty or so, some of whom are relegated to just breathing bodies, but still a lot to juggle character-wise.

I haven't read the source novella in eons, so I don't know what matches up, but that the

Spoiler

religious nutjobs sacrifice the soldier bound (presumably) for Iraq to feed their theories on the nature of the unseen terror in the Mist

... was pretty spot on political commentary, which in a picture of this kind, I don't mind at all.

That they went ahead and went grim for a denouement, well, pessimism has its place in the genre, don't it?

The best King horror adaptation in many a moon. M-O-O-N.

Oh, I don't know about thaaaaaaaaaat. I thought it was a pretty well-made siege picture. The precedent isn't Shaun of the Dead, which of course the King novella precedes by, oh, two decades or so, it's RiofuckingBravo (though if you wanna get technical about the affinities of the ending, well, okay, it's Night of the Living Dead).

The King novella doesn't have that ending. It doesn't have anything approaching that ending.

The reason I call it the Shaun of the Dead ending is that a) that's the most recent precedent, and it mirrors it exactly down to the woman we saw earlier) b) because it was used so badly in this circumstance that it reads exactly like the parody Shaun was.

That they went ahead and went grim for a denouement, well, pessimism has its place in the genre, don't it?

That's the thing - I don't think it was grim enough, or maybe even not grim at all.

The ending I'm talking about, closer to King's version, is as bleak as possible, without laying out all of its cards. (nb: the novella is one of the few works of King fiction I'll rep for - certainly a better ending than any of his novels)

Milo,

Good thoughts, all. Since I don't have a copy of the novella at hand, can you spoiler-quote a summary of King's original, grimmer closing? I confess I don't recall it at all.

jesus the mexican boi wrote:Good thoughts, all. Since I don't have a copy of the novella at hand, can you spoiler-quote a summary of King's original, grimmer closing? I confess I don't recall it at all.

I'm not Milo, but I read it in middle school, I believe what happens is

Spoiler

The father, the girl and the son leave the grocery store and stop at an abandoned Howard Johnsons. While driving they pass a huge brontosaurus-type creature. They sort of calmly prep to leave again and face whatever waits them in the mist as they drive in search of hope.

you gotta be kidding me wrote:So how does the story compare to Carpenter's The Fog?

Good question! I liked them both though I do not think they are self-consciously related, just dealing with a similar kind of subject - King's story was much more focused on being 'trapped and menaced' and what happens once the store is surrounded and the worries of what is going on elsewhere, which it sounds as if the ending Darabont has given to the film plays upon in what sounds to be quite a brutal fashion (I am not sure what I will think about it until I get a chance to see the film and how it plays - I thought one of the most powerful parts of King's story was the ambiguous ending)

The things I like most about John Carpenter's The Fog are the atmosphere and the score - the whole opening sequence from the camp fire story through to the strange events in the town in the middle of the night is wonderful. I think the atmosphere created by certain sequences is so powerful that it completely overpowers what is quite an underwhelming mystery/vengeful ghosts story. Strangely it also overwhelms the Jamie Lee Curtis storyline which seems content to coast along on Jamie Lee's presence and familiarity to viewers from Halloween - even using similar jump scares that worked wonderfully for Curtis and Carpenter in Halloween but just seem hackneyed in The Fog. If it was anyone other than Curtis playing that role there would be nothing of merit in that strand of the story at all, but I think it is her 'scream queen' presence and reteaming of her and Carpenter that manages to carry it through - along with the late in the film meeting between Curtis and Leigh's characters that adds an extra horror film fan frisson. But that is the problem with the Curtis section of The Fog - the only excitement that really comes out of it is from knowing the actors and their significance, not anything generated within that section of the film itself.

I think the Curtis scenes seem particularly bland because the other strands of the film are so good - I love the banter between Janet Leigh's character and her secretary and when they start to get nervous they have built up the authority by the way they have been managing every last detail of the pageant and their sceptical reaction to their local priest's guilty rambling that their fear helps to make the audience nervous.

And the very best scenes belong to the incredibly beautiful Adrienne Barbeau - not just the excitingly tense final scenes scrambling around on the roof of the lighthouse but the magnificent early scene where her son finds a piece of the shipwreck on the beach and the next sequence where she drives through the windswept landscape in her car and then walks down to her radio station at the lighthouse playing potential ident jingles for her show. That sequence is the one that most sticks in my mind for sheer atmosphere, not frightening but beautifully and slightly creepy that then pays off in spades in the following scene when the dry driftwood starts leaking saltwater that possesses the tape player and sends a ghostly message!

I love Carpenter's The Fog for a number of different reasons: the Curtis/Carpenter reuinion, the Curtis/Leigh meet up, John Houseman's campfire story, Hal Holbrook's priest lugging a giant solid gold cross, Adrienne Barbeau doing anything(!), the kindly old lady being brutally bumped off, the radio show host urgently trying to guide people away from the fog bank, the windswept landscapes with the occasional foghorn sounding, Carpenter's fantastic score and the intercutting between the different storylines (however I thought he really did his best and most complex editing work in Ghosts of Mars even though I felt other aspects of that film were nowhere near the level of his best, more conventionally edited, earlier work).

All of those things mean that I do not particularly mind the ghosts of leper pirates motivation for what occurs and the abruptness of the ending, purposefully anti-climactic in preparation for that final shock!

Sorry for writing so long about Carpenter's film but who knows when I would next get the opportunity to do so! Anyway I suspect that The Mist will have difficulty matching my favourite scenes from Carpenter's film, and does not really need to try as it is not as if it is a remake per se (unlike the 2005 Fog film which I have heard is terrible!). The one area that Carpenter's film did not really work for me was in creating realistic characterisations and interactions between people, while I found the strength of King's story was the focus on that, especially in the middle section of the story, to the extent that the bug threat was almost secondary to what was going on inside the store (I think this basic plotline was taken to its extreme in The Langoliers where none of the characters really know what is going on or that there is any threat until the end of the film and the bulk of that story focuses on their exploring and trying to understand their eerily empty world and the various character's reactions: grouping and bonding together, revealing secrets, descending into madness and having love affairs - in that sense most of King's monsters in these stories are as much MacGuffins as Hitchcock's birds)

Similarly I think of Gerald's Game as being an even more stripped down version of Misery to the extent that the story itself is unfilmable - handcuffed to a bed and slowly dying but not being terrorised by a psychotic nurse?

This review of 'fog themed' stories leads me to recommend the ultimate use of the substance in James Herbert's book! If it is apocalyptic madness you want Herbert's novel has it all, though it is as as obviously unfilmable as Gerald's Game if for completely the opposite reason - rather than being too stripped down, a decent version of Herbert's novel would call for a Hollywood level budget, which is something that would seem to be impossible for the British film industry (and I do not think the US would be interested in making a huge budget UK-based horror film), only compounded by the sheer perversity of some of the set pieces as madness causes every taboo to be broken and spares no one. I do not think that even in these more 'liberal' times any film, let alone one with a blockbuster budget, could get away with a sequence in which a group of fog-exposed schoolkids attack their gym instructor, strip and tie him to the wallbars of his gym and pelt his head with medicine balls while at the same time indulging in an enormous orgy before burning themselves to death

A book v film comparison of The Mist is at The Onion AV Club

I'm absolutely baffled by the positive notices for this film. This was such an awful, contrived piece of garbage that for all the flack Shyamalan gets, even at his worst, he's never made something this bad.

When the characters aren't put into sequences in which they somehow ignore any instinct they might have to survive and stand around gawping at monsters or refusing to flee dangerous situations, we get bunch of rote stock characters (Dumb Hillbillies, Bible Thumbers, Angry Black Guy, Confused Young Military Guy, Kind Hearted Whore) dressed up in phony "political commentary" posturing.

As for the ending, it's so ridiculously preposterous I can't believe that:

Spoiler

a guy who would risk getting killed to get a gun off the hood of his Jeep, somehow couldn't find a gas station along the interstate to tank up and of course, happened to somehow avoid the military tanks and guys with blowtorches laying waste to Oregon.

Antoine Doinel wrote:Kind Hearted Whore

What character are you referring to?

Galen Young wrote:

Antoine Doinel wrote:Kind Hearted Whore

What character are you referring to?

I was referring to Amanda who the religious nut calls a "whore" at one point. I gathered we're supposed to take it that she's single and dating. I'll admit, that one is probably stretching it a bit, but not much.

Antoine Doinel wrote:I was referring to Amanda

Third grade/special-ed teacher = Kind Hearted Whore? I think I saw a different movie...

Who's married, also. I thought cutting the sex scene between her and the father from the novella was one of the few improvements to the text.

Alas, the only thing that got me through this was thinking back to reading the source material on the bus ride home from middle school, enraptured in the proceedings which work in King's functional text, but fail miserably with the eye-rolling lack of subtlety and political juvenilia Darabont exhibits here. There are so many obvious and insulting plays to audience identification and sympathy that I literally became furious by the thirty minute mark or so once the whole business of Braugher's character comes into play. Not furious because he's so frustrating within the narrative the film builds, but because Darabont's laborious efforts to make sure every person watching GETS IT with bells and whistles and fireworks strikes me as condescending. But oh ho, I did not know true condescension until we get the political allegories working full steam ahead and the movie devolves into one forehead slap after another. None of this hamfistedness is helped by Darabont's fatal decision to film this mostly using hand-held cameras-- if you're gonna make a monster movie, don't film it like Homicide! Tracked dolly shots could have at least made this look classy and polished. I watched the B&W version, as recommended, and this probably helped mask some of the bad CGI, but brother, not all of it.

What can I praise? Well, I was reminded of how good the basic story elements are when you peel away the awkward social commentary Darabont has foisted onto everything. The ending, before, well, the ending, is tonally strong and had it ended with the shots fired, as someone suggested, no one could say the film didn't try to redeem itself (to paraphrase the ever-present King staple Jeffrey DeMunn). Uh, what else... hmm... Laurie Holden has excellent brows.

Well. I expected this, but I am surprised at the accusations of hamfisted social commentary - I have never picked up on this as anything but an auxiliary aspect of the plot (an attempt to keep the dialogue relevant) but every time I've watched this one I've been too absorbed in the monster plot to notice if anyone decided they wanted me to take away a political message. I take away a very old fashioned monster movie from this one, rather than a 21st century preachfest, but maybe I'm missing something. It seems to fit into our current political culture in a relaxed way, not a "WE NEED SOME PLOT HERE!" way. And come on Domino, you know the ending is bitchin'

The whole Marcia Gay Harding character is a little too juvenile in her portrayal. Than again it just came off as very Kingy to me with the whole horror aspect working just perfectly(at least in B&W).

mfunk9786 wrote: every time I've watched this

You've willingly watched this more than once??

It's one of my favorite films of 2007 and it chills me to the bone every time I see it.