Ending Utterly Destroys the Enterprise

Rating: 1/10 (9 April 2008)

I read this novella, what, 20+ years ago, and its genius has never left me. I was thrilled to see it was to be made into a film. I didn't have the greatest expectations: monster movies are so difficult to pull off when the creatures must be featured so prominently. So I forgive some of the cheesy rubber looking beasts that invade our world as depicted in the film.
For most of the movie, I can say the sense of dread, foreboding, terror and helplessness is well maintained. And who can say how people would behave under such extraordinary stress and terror? That's part of the story's strength; you can't say the actions of the store patrons are not believable because you've no standard against which to measure it.
But, and I cannot state it any more plainly, the ending of the film is the absolute worst conceptual piece I have ever experienced. Not only is the emotional sledgehammer delivered in the final scene outrageous, the "tragic" formula, ironically, requires the assumption of the most ridiculous premises imaginable, far worse than anything else in the film. Are we really to buy off on the idea that they left the store at the exact time that would lead them to run out of gas on the exact road on the exact spot that if they had left 90 seconds later or chatted about what they were about to do a couple of minutes they would've been saved by an armed force suddenly and inexplicably able to exterminate the millions of killer-saurs that flooded thorough the dimension breach? Was it some kind of joke? Was it, "You'd never buy off on them making it to safety, so take a bite off this!"???? It seemed like a cheap trick a Jr. high kid would try to pull off.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am the father of small children, and the final scene in the truck, with all its implications, is not of the kind to be undertaken so flippantly. I might have given this film 7 or more stars if Thomas Jane had simply raged into the mist to end it. The director's choice of closing is so callously conceived and preposterously delivered it completely ruined an otherwise fine horror movie.