Is it about monsters in the mist, or about the monsters in our psyche?

Rating: Null/10 (30 September 2008)

Set in Maine and filmed in Shreveport, "The Mist" is nominally about strange monsters in the thick mist that engulfs a small community one day. But most of the movie takes place in the local supermarket where a strange cross-section of the town's population happen to be trapped, trying to elude the evil things inside the mist.
Thomas Jane is the cool one, and dad, David Drayton. He is an artist, drawing movie posters, and with a college education, something some of the locals are jealous of.
At the other end of the spectrum is Marcia Gay Harden as Mrs. Carmody, a religious freak who sees this crisis as God's punishment for bad human behavior.
As the crisis deepens and people die, the people in the store become divided into two camps, those who think like David and those who think like Carmody.
But the movie is only thinly about the monsters, and where they came from. It is more a study of human nature and how people react to a crisis and to each other. In many respects it is "Lord of the Flies" among adults.
Mostly interesting, but often too exaggerated to be taken as a serious story.
SPOILERS: As David heads towards town after an overnight storm, to get supplies and to fix his broken studio window, he notices many military vehicles "coming off the mountain" in a hurry. As it all turns out they had been doing some experimenting and had opened a "portal" to another dimension that let some strange creatures through. It was these that were hiding in the mist and endangering everyone. In the end David and 4 others were stranded in the mist when his vehicle ran out of fuel. Not wanting to subject them to the monsters, he shot everyone, even his son. But then as the mist started to lift finds that the military has achieved the upper hand, all died for no reason and David was on his way to insanity.