Shawshank debunked

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 2008)

"I have nothing against religion...but religion cross-pollinates with politics. In both cases there's always somebody standing by to say, "we have the answer." - Stephen King
We've seen this type of film before, but it does several interesting things which I found refreshing. Firstly, it's a direct assault on all those Christian fundamentalists who salivate over Darabont's earlier film, "The Shawshank Redemption". Secondly, it's a pretty interesting study of mob dynamics. Thirdly, it works as a nice counterpoint to Spielberg's "War of the Worlds".
Following 9/11, we had a slew of films which tried to be "socially relevant" by dealing with themes of "terrorism" and "fear". America was under attack by some faceless enemy and so Hollywood directors responded by smuggling little socio-political themes into what would otherwise be brainless popcorn flicks.
Spielberg's last few films offer perhaps the simplest way to observe this trend. "Saving Private Ryan" was a loud and thoughtless film which served only to regenerate ugly pro-nationalist ideology. America is good. The enemy is bad. Die for the motherland.
"Minority Report" was Spielberg's justification of the Patriot Act. You may wiretap our phones and spy on our lives, so long as you're righteous and moral. Then with "War of the Worlds" Spielberg painted America as being the victims of technologically advanced "sleeper cell terrorists", the aliens embedded within our own home soils, ready and waiting to strike. Finally there was "Munich", Spielberg's big "let's forget about the past and all get along".
In Hollywood, Spielberg (because of his phenomenal shooting speed) is usually 2 years ahead of the curve. So when he hit us with "War of the Worlds" in 2005, it took a further 2 years for other artists to create terror allegories of their own. "No Country for Old Men", "In the Valley of Elah", "Cloverfield", "The Mist", "Dark Knight", "Lions for Lambs", "Michael Clayton" etc etc. All these films tried to be serious by injecting faint 9/11 subtext. Most will age badly because they're so short sighted.
"The Mist" is basically an R rated "War of the Worlds". Both films begin with a mysterious and violent lightning storm, involve strange creatures attacking a family unit, and end with a "shocking" scene involving a son. Darabont includes several nods to Spielberg's film: giant tripod like creatures, rolling clouds of dust/mist, family vans, ominous alien horns, military convoys etc.
But while both films have a similar structure, both artists have completely different interests. Spielberg loves building action sequences. Darabont, in contrast, loves dialogue and characters. While "The Mist's" action sequences and CGI effects are pretty inept, the human interactions are quite riveting. For Darabont, human beings can be as bad or worse than the alien nightmares that hunt them. He's interested in mob dynamics and how human beings regress and organise themselves under extreme stress.
Darabont also rights the wrong at the end of Spielberg's film. While Spielberg couldn't resist bringing Tom Cruise's son back to life, Darabont has his hero shoot his own son dead. Better to die to a family bullet than at the hands of the enemy.
With this killing, "The Mist" presents the flip-side of Darabont's earlier film, "The Shawshank Redemption". "Shawshank" was about maintaining hope in the face of adversity. "The Mist" is about the consequences of losing hope.
In "Shawshank", Tim Robbins begins to despair, but slowly regains faith. In "Mist", the hero loses all hope and kills his family in order to ease their suffering. After their death, he learns that they would have been saved had they remained hopeful just several minutes longer.
Tim Robbin's has become a sort of a poster-boy for Christian fundamentalists, who see his trials in "Shawshank" as a kind of Christian suffering. He's persecuted, but faithfully absorbs his worldly punishment. He knows that if he waits just a bit longer, he'll be freed from prison and rewarded for his faith. In "The Mist", the main "evil" in the film is a crazy woman (Marcia Gay Harden) who uses fear as a religious tool. If the townsfolk have faith in her, she says, they will be freed from the evil monsters. Ironically, at the end of the film, this crazy woman is shown to be right. The townsfolk who obey her, ultimately survive.
But Darabont's point is that hope is a natural thing and should not be prostituted to religion. Religious hope requires prerequisites (ie following a murderous, crazy lady). So the film presents two scenarios, and labels them both wrong. Following the crazy lady is wrong (patriotism/religious indoctrination) and giving up all hope is wrong (defeatism/suicide). Thus, Darabont is drawing us toward the third option. The townsfolk would have survived, had they simply stayed quietly in the store, like Tim Robbins, silently hopeful.
But Darabont isn't only preaching hopeful inaction. He preaches hopeful action as well, by inserting a symbolic mother figure who bravely steps out into the Mist, hoping to find her child. Significantly, everyone in the group refused to help this mother. She stands alone, and thus has the strongest faith. At the end of the film, we see her with her child.
The fact that Christians have protested this film and shown great disappointment in the way the Marcia Gay Hayden character was treated, just goes to show how successful Darabont was in countering their false reading of "The Shawshank Redemption".
8/10 - Shot on a low budget using a cheap TV crew, "The Mist" works as a cross between "Dawn of the Dead" and "War of the Worlds". Yes, the CGI "action sequences" are crap, but the human drama is pretty effective. PS- the film needs to be watched in black and white, as originally intended. It's far more effective when viewed this way.
Worth two viewings.