I want my time back - I want to forget what I just saw.

Rating: 1/10 (2 December 2007)

Have to add my voice to the growing throng of viewers who thought the ending spoiled an otherwise reasonably satisfying movie.
I read the original novella years ago and to be honest didn't care too much for its nebulous ending.
However, Kings original ending would have been infinitely preferable to the downbeat one tagged on this adaptation.
It's perfectly possible to have successful indefinite endings on movies (think "The Birds"), and downbeat sucker punch endings can do work too (think "The Wicker Man", the original version). Movies do not have to have happy ending to be satisfying for the viewers, however, if a movie is going to have a downbeat ending, it ought to at least adhere to the internal logic of the movie and be consistent with the characterizations that have been developed up to that point.
The key point is satisfying for the viewer. Such is not the case with this movie. The ending makes you leave the theater sickened, depressed, wanting to slap the director, and wishing you could turn the hands of time back to before you saw it so you could forget it.
Spoiler: It might have been possible to end the movie with David Drayton wandering off into the Mist looking for something to kill him after he'd used up the (conveniently) last four bullets putting everybody (including his son) out of their misery (not that they were miserable really, just trapped in a truck), maybe. Even though this ending would have the Drayton character going against everything he stood for in the previous two hours of the film and even though it goes against the survivor-ist mentality of the rest of the people in the car and woefully disregards their ability to siphon gas from other roadside vehicles, or get some from abandoned gas pumps, etc... That ending might have worked if handled deftly. Unfortunately Darabont takes it one step further and literally rubs salt in the wounds by having the army show up moments after Drayton has pulled his Jonestown stunt, so the one character whom you've followed from the beginning of the film is driven hopelessly insane by his own actions - cute huh?
Consider the many reviewers that have given this movie one star simply because the ending was so bad. I have to agree. Were it not for the ending, I would be giving the a seven or an eight.
What kind of an audience was used to test market this? If Darabonts intention was to sicken and depress and instill hatred for the director in his audience, then he was successful. As far as I'm concerned, the only entertainer who was able to pull that trick off successfully was Andy Kauffman.