The Mist is a horror movie based on the novella by Stephen King and starring Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Garden, Jeffery DeMunn, Andre Braugher, Toby Jones, Laurie Holden, William Sadler, Frances Sternhagen, Sam Witwer, and Nathan Gamble.
David Drayton (Jane), his wife Steph (Kelly Collins Lintz), and their son Billy (Gamble) go to their basement as a massive storm ravages the area, and in the morning discover everything's pretty wrecked. David goes to the supermarket, taking Billy and their neighbor Norton (Braugher), and don't think much of the weird mist rolling in off the lake.
But after just a few minutes in the store, a man called Dan (DeMunn) comes running in, bleeding and screaming about "things" in the mist. And from there it becomes worse; a big tentacled horror drags off a bag boy (Chris Owen), but not enough people see it and Norton leads a contingent of idiots out into the mist. They are, we assume, promptly devoured.
The survivors very quickly rally around Mrs. Carmody, an evangelical Christian and terrible person (but I repeat myself), who convinces her "flock" that the monsters can only be sated by blood sacrifice. Eventually David leads a small group of people out of the store to his car. Several are killed en route, leaving only David, Billy, Dan, old teacher Irene (Sternhagen) and newly hired teacher Amanda (Holden). They keep driving for a while...
...and here's where the only major point of divergence from the source material happens, and it's a doozy. In the book, Drayton and company catch a fragmented radio broadcast, and make out one word: "Hartford." And so they set out, because that's the only hope they have.
In the movie, Drayton's car runs out of gas and they're still in the mist, hearing horrible noises. They all agree that a quick death is better than being eaten, so Drayton shoots them all including his son, and then, out of bullets, gets out of the car to await death...only to see the Army roll up and the mist clearing as soldiers torch any monsters they find. In a really nice "fuck you, and also no really fuck you" moment, a young woman (Melissa McBride) who left the store early on to get home to her kids is right there on a truck with other refugees.
(There are other changes, too, of course; in the book Drayton and Amanda bang in an office in the store, and it makes sense in context but it would have been really out of place in the movie. One of the soldiers stuck in the store (Witwer) gives a half-assed explanation for how all this happened. Stuff like that. Nothing too important, though; it's really a very faithful adaptation.)
So the question is: Does that rather extreme ending work, and does the rest of the movie work up to that change? I think the latter is definitely a "yes." The creatures are a little too CGI in places, but for the most part it holds up and the design does a nice job of giving us something that's almost recognizable as an animal but then tweaking the horror a little (my favorite is the tentacles with awful black spines). The action/horror sequences are well done, but they also include what I would call the main theme of the movie: to wit, people do fucked up shit in survival situations and no one is as cool as they think they would be. The survivors come up with plans, but when they don't work and awful shit happens, they fall apart and latch onto the first person with a solution. Unfortunately that's Mrs. Carmody, and Harden does an amazing job of making her hateful but also vulnerable at times.
That theme carries through to the end. It's easy to think David and company are doing what makes sense in the moment, but the truth of the matter is that they don't think it through at all. They're just so traumatized and beaten down by that point, having seen people get eaten by monsters and other people get stabbed, shot, burned, and beaten either by accident or very much on purpose that they choose to die. I think the ending makes sense, and I think it's fair given the rest of the movie. Is it a better ending than the book? I don't know. I think if they'd kept the book ending but kept the ambiguity (in the book Drayton isn't even 100% sure he heard "Hartford," and either way he doesn't know if the context is "come to Hartford, we have cookies and monkey butlers" or "stay the fuck away from Hartford, there's a giant crocosquirrel eating everyone"), it would have worked just fine. I don't think the bleak ending doesn't work, though, it's just a matter of how dark you like your coffee, as it were.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-low
Next up: Nurse Betty
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