A Potentially Good B Film, With Intriguing Premise....Ruined

Rating: 1/10 (23 April 2008)

**This comment has spoilers starting with the second paragraph.** Readers of Stephen King's novellas will remember The Mist as an especially chilling and intriguing thought experiment. How will a random group of people react when confronted with an utterly alien threat, which traps them together in an enclosed place by surprise, one from which there seems no possible escape, and thus makes them confront not only the danger but all the kinds of fears, hopes, and weaknesses human beings have? Other commenters, such as the featured 23 November 2007, have already discussed the good acting, dialog, editing, and tension buildup of what promises to be a solid and actually thoughtful B-movie.
However, Frank Darabont's oh-so-stylishly nihilistic ending destroys the movie, a big alien-bug foot (or Monty Python Foot?) crunching the story. Now nihilistic-type endings can work well, as in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), with the last two survivors of the Antarctic station facing each other in fear, or George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), in which the last human survivor is mistakenly shot by the police.
Both bring the overwhelming danger to an end that makes the perceptive viewer confront horror that a merely-worldly horizon can't process; Carpenter with isolated, terrified and mutually suspicious survivors, and Romero with a man whose best shot ends with that most real of all possibilities, a random mistake.
In this case, however, it's just too much. The survivors have sacrificed and suffered suitably; all have been forced to confront danger (the monsters), evil (Mrs. Carmody's twisting of religion in brutal, murderous fashion to assuage her fear), random losses (Drayton's wife and the broken window), and the costs of trying to survive (the loss of Ollie Weeks and two others getting to the car). They drive along. They see more monsters, destruction, and death. And they run out of gas.
People have suffered, made mistakes, and died. No one could accuse Darabont, five minutes before the end, of having pulled punches in portraying King's story faithfully and with skill. No one would accuse him of a pollyanna ending if even he had Drayton & Co say try to leave the gas-empty land rover--and some of them die running to the end of the Mist that they don't know is right in front of them. Or if he had preserved King's chilling and uncertain original ending, of Drayton & co. hearing the word "Hartford" in radio static and holding it as their word of hope as they drive on.
But to have Drayton, the lead character, despair, at that last moment, and kill all these survivors, including his son, before leaving the car to die and instead being saved, sorry. That's the sledgehammer blow that ruins it. It's over the top and too much. This story is about some people staying rational through it all, confronting the range of human emotions and weaknesses one would expect in such a situation, and trying. This ending is gratuitously nihilistic and ruins the story.
So I say without hesitation: don't waste your time on this movie. Shame on Frank Darabont for taking a thoughtful, intriguing novella and ruining it as a film.