A depressing & inconsistent mess

Rating: 3/10 (18 October 2013)

WARNING - This contains a lot of spoilers.
Having seen this movie recommended by several people on IMDb I thought this would be a sure winner - but how wrong I was. By 20 minutes into it I had already started fast forwarding, mostly due to the excruciatingly annoying and repetitious religious nut that the director saw fit to give a large percentage of screen time to. I get what he was trying to convey but we don't need multiple scenes of her irritating ranting for several minutes at a time to get the point.
I watch a movie to be entertained and enthralled or engaged not to listen to a lunatic constantly bashing people over the head with her sick hate-filled interpretation of the Bible. Almost half the screen time was given over to this character with nothing original or interesting about her dialogue and most of it just the same point being made over and over again.
Unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot to redeem the movie from this serious mis-step. Some of the special effects were good, other parts actually made me laugh they were so bad. I loved the giant bugs & their pterodactyl-like predators and would say that scene was the best part of the movie - possibly even the only part worth watching.
Apart from some contrived "evil religious fanatics" vs "perfect everyday heroes" scenarios and some nice shots of large scary insects who occasionally killed people, there isn't much else to see or recommend. The characters are all pretty much one-dimensional (either good/sane or bad/nutty as a fruit-cake) and the story itself really only needed 5 minutes to tell. There are a lot of overly melodramatic scenes with some really bad ham acting and terrible dialogue. The are many MANY puzzling scenes where something horrible is supposed to be happening but everyone is just standing around doing nothing and watching instead of, you know, killing the thing or even running away. There was one scene involving spiders where people were being so gormless & stupid I started rooting for the critters.
The biggest problem with The Mist though is the completely unrealistic attempt to portray the psychological "melt down" of the people in the supermarket. I understand folks get desperate when stressed/frightened etc and that would have been an interesting aspect to explore. But what they did with that concept was ridiculous and trivial. The sudden switch within just a day or so, from normal standard folk out shopping, to raving moronic idiots who believe the words of some clearly deranged, vicious religious nut and are happily ready to sacrifice children to a vengeful God (or rather - to a large octopus) stretched the bounds of credibility way too much. In fact, the concept of opening a portal to another world and letting in critters from outer space was actually more realistic than the way the people were portrayed in this movie.
And after suffering through this ridiculous, headache-inducing woman ranting and raving for an hour or so, we finally get to the end of the movie where the "heroes" make the most outrageously stupid decision imaginable just so the director can come up with an ending he thinks is clever and shocking. In reality the ending is nonsense. It makes no sense for them not to at least get out of the car and investigate to see if there's any other options available to them. Like - I dunno, siphoning petrol from or stealing an abandoned car or walking as far as they can to see if there's an end to the mist. The gun would have been a final desperate option when all else had failed and at that point there were still many other options available. I could think of at least a dozen more obvious and consistent actions they would have taken when the car ran out of petrol and as many better ways to end this movie. The one the Director went with was clearly just a cheap gimmick and an insult to the intelligence and good will of viewers.
Instead of feeling entertained/thrilled/shocked/scared the movie made me feel annoyed/irritated/bored/exasperated/disappointed and most of all - cheated.
This felt like some sort of extreme fanatical evangelist movie - in the end the religious extremists survive despite doing nothing to help others and being murderous child-killing cowards, while the people who did the most to help others and were sane, reasonable and took risks to save their fellow men & women - but did not join the "cult" - came out the losers.
Wouldn't recommend this flick to my worst enemy.