The Mist never misses

Rating: 10/10 (23 November 2007)

The streak of awesome Frank Darabont/Stephen King collaborations continues with The Mist, based on King's novella of the same name, and happily unrelated to The Fog. The story also inspired the video game Half-Life, which is a personal favorite. Having spawned a great movie and a great game, maybe I ought to read this story someday It starts off simply, with a terrible storm one night that knocks over trees, takes out the power, and sends most of the local populace into town for supplies. David Drayton (Thomas Jane) brings his son to the grocery store and notices a large cloud of mist over the lake. Not long after arriving at the store, the same cloud of mist overtakes the entire area and with it comes fear, paranoia, and really creepy noises. After some reports of people being taken or killed by things in the mist, and after some amount of discussion, everyone decides they have to stay inside the grocery store. Even without the mysterious presence in the mist, I'd feel rather trapped in that store since you can't see more than five feet in front of you. In fact, I have to give the filmmakers special acknowledgment for making the best mist/fog/all-encompassing smoke I've ever seen in a movie. Silent Hill had some good-looking ash, but it was merely visual. The mist in this movie takes on a soupy quality where it simply appears hard to move through. And the sound design, implying all manner of creepy beasts out there, takes it to a new level.
It quickly becomes clear that the noises in the mist belong to real creatures, not the peoples' collective imagination. Flying, crawling, tip-tapping, slithering things that seem projected directly out of H.P. Lovecraft's brain, only better. All of the monsters have disturbingly human features too, which is just amazing. A foot-long flying slug with a nasty stinger is scary enough, I'd say, but you give that thing a face that looks like a skull but with more teeth and you're approaching brilliance. Hear me now, readers. The monsters are great. The monsters. Are great.
But there are other monsters too. These also look human, but that's only because they are. As more creatures show up and more people die, more of the survivors go a little bit nuts. They're afraid and want answers and a solution to their predicament, which is understandable. They find their answers in a local "unstable" woman named Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) - a Bible-toting doom-sayer. As the days inside the grocery store go by, she convinces more and more people that this is the End of Days and the demons outside are God's punishment. The situation grows more desperate by the minute and people start taking sides. And before you know it, the side that wants to sacrifice people to the monsters outside has got numbers on its side.
Thomas Jane is a good leading man, as usual, but the stand out performance belongs to Toby Jones, who played Truman Capote in that other movie about Capote a couple years ago. His transformation from meek cashier to sharpshooting bad ass is a pivotal counterpoint to Mrs. Carmody's own transformation of the people in the store. It's a picture of brains vs. mysticism. Hard work, courage, and persistence vs. fear, hatred, and the blindest faith I've ever seen. Social commentary gets a thumbs up from me, but there are one or two scenes that push it too far before Mrs. Carmody's inevitable rise to power. Just pieces of dialogue and bits of action from the players that don't seem to fit the picture. In real life, I believe Mrs. Carmody would have been bound, gagged, tarred, feathered, and made to wear a dunce cap real soon after all the End of Days nonsense. But that's not the point. It's not supposed to be about what people would do if they were trapped in a store by monsters, it's about what people (in general and in groups) do when bombarded by fear. Do they overcome it or do they sink below it? Replace the constant, unebbing mist with the constant, unebbing threat of terrorism and you can start to understand how this movie relates to the real world. Do we confront the fear ourselves or do we place our faith in someone or something else to rescue us? Let it be said that there are things - sounds, images, emotions - in this film that I never thought I'd experience in a theater. It is supremely bizarre without ever losing focus of its human story or of its connection to our world. There is a little too much social analyzing going on, creating large gaps between the really impressive creature sequences, and also a problem or two with its ending. Mainly that I saw it coming about ten minutes before it actually did. Still, despite any flaws within, I can't recommend you see this movie enough.
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