Barely Adequate Sci-Fi Horror

Rating: 2/10 (23 April 2008)

What you have here is an old-fashioned survival horror movie in which ordinary citizens are pitted against giant squishy things from who knows where. A spooky mist rolls into town on an otherwise pleasant afternoon, and from it emerge tentacled horrors, trapping about 20 Mainers and vacationing summer people in a small supermarket. From there, they struggle, and that's the plot in a nutshell.
Because it's based rather faithfully on a Stephen King novella, at least as much emphasis is placed on interpersonal character dynamics as on the bug nasties from dimension 7. Unfortunately, however, none of it rings true. Everything about the film feels stagy and two-dimensional. This is probably the fault of director Frank Darabont, who never met a treacly character cliché he couldn't embrace fully. Meanwhile the invading beasties, while reasonably cool, aren't ever particularly frightening. Darabont is more concerned with mildly thrilling sci-fi action than with building suspense or delivering raw horror. Only in the film's final moments, when the true, Lovecraftian scale of the threat is finally revealed, do we really get a taste of anything genuinely dreadful.
Overall, The Mist feels, more than anything else, like a better-than-average Sci-Fi channel production. You get the same blocky staging, unconvincing sets and obvious exposition. The same cardboard characters running through their cardboard histrionics. The same hokey digital monsters (though, admittedly, executed on a bigger budget than cable TV could ever manage). The only really interesting thing about the movie was the amount of time spent on a subplot involving a messianic crazy woman and her destabilizing effect on our intrepid little band of would-be survivors. This subplot, unfortunately, plays out in just as ham-fisted and obvious a manner as the rest of the film, so what might have been a neat little philosophical puzzle is flattened into a shrill, anti-Christian tirade.
Despite it's many failings, The Mist's ending is its greatest sin. I'd have been perfectly happy if it had ended where King's story did, with our doomed heroes simply riding off into an unknown but unpromising future. Darabont, however, decided to wrap things up in a decidedly grim and Serling-esquire manner. I found the "shocking" conclusion insultingly overstated, out of character and borderline senseless.
1/10, but there is one fantastic effects shot towards the end (you'll know it when you see it).