Entertaining, yet rather troubling re-imagining of NOTLD and DAWN

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2014)

Frank Darabont, the director of SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and THE GREEN MILE, once again adapts a Stephen King story and somehow manages to create an entertaining little jump-shocker, despite the story being little more than a rewrite of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD... right down to a horrifyingly downbeat ending. Disappointingly, this films ending lacks the pitch black social criticism of Romero's ending, wherein - of course - the "establishment" rescuers ended up killing the films heroic survivor. Instead, in this version, the rescuers are merely too late to stop our hero from doing something horrific, yet they are seemingly quite successfully at saving many others. Thus, in the end, the "moral" of THE MIST seems to simply be about the power of fear to make us behave toward each other in terrible ways. Sure, there's an important message there, but it lacks the political bite of the message in the film that it borrows from, thus making it feel inferior. And by substituting creatures-from-another-dimension for zombies, the film also loses an additional, dread-inspiring, man-against-himself element.
But enough with comparisons to NOTLD, you say? OK, but there's also this... by setting the story in a supermarket, King has also borrowed significantly from another Romero film, DAWN OF THE DEAD. And sadly, it does so without including any equivalent to DAWN's darkly comic social critique. In short, THE MIST can't help but be compared to these other films, and these comparisons can only leave it lacking. Though I enjoyed THE MIST, and would certainly watch it again, I very much wish King had found a more fully original structure to hang his story on.