stayed true to the story, intense, gory, creepy, apocalyptic, yet i loved every minute of it. (spoilers)

Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2007)

I'll admit that i had been waiting almost 10 since reading this story for it to become a film. the story itself had so many film like elements that made the reader feel like he/she was actually watching a movie rather than reading a story.
I'm not giving this a high rating just because i liked the story, but because it was an accurate portrayal of the story, its intensity, and lots of innovations to give it a nasty atmosphere.
first the negatives, which there aren't too many. at times the acting tended to be on the bland side but then picked back up as the scene went along or got more intense. if you look closely when the camera is on the mist from inside to the upper screen you can see the spotlights showing from a ceiling, but i guess they were covering that as a sodium street light, i dunno. i was expecting to see more of the monster that grabbed Ollie as that was a climax, but i guess its more scarier not to see all of it. the ending definitely isn't everyones ending, but an ending nonetheless that should be expected in any horror film because horror films aren't supposed to have good endings. however i would've preferred if they used the original ending from the story and let the audience use their own imagination as to what happened to them.
now for the positives. despite the bland moments i mentioned above, Jane, Holden, Jones, Nathan and Hardin handle their roles very well. Hardin is so unlikeable that i have to say she did a damn good job of playing off her intentions. 2 scenes that grabbed me was w/ Jane and his son begging him not to go to the pharmacy, and Hardin about to sacrifice Nathan/Holden (the audience clapped at the end of this scene.) i was actually surprised that among the intense moments you could find comedic moments in between that the audience seemed to identify with. Frank really does a great job of bringing lots of realism to the film and gives it a realistic feel. sorta like how Spielberg did movies like jaws or close encounters, he has the whole ensemble cast participate very well as one. i also like how he uses the fade out to black tactic used in Carpenter's THE THING. so even though this film is set in present time, that fade out effect gave it a very 80s horror film feel which i felt worked very well for this film. the fact that there's not too much music is also interesting. but the end score is so depressing/apocalyptic that no other score could've fit better. the creature's while they're not the main focus to the actual theme of the story, were made so "out of this world", undefined, unexpected, yet very close to how i expected them to turn out from reading the story/hearing the audio book. the creature at the end, i will admit was by far the weirdest yet creepiest monster I've ever seen on film. the theme of humans being the real monsters rather than the monsters outside is what makes this film a classic. and if the general public cant see that and expect a monster film w/ a decent ending, then all i can say is they're loss. the underlying messages brought across by Hardin's character about the decay of our society, the misinterpretations of religion, and the evils of our consumer society really says a lot about how we would act if this actually happened to us. Jones defines that perfectly in one of his lines.
this film was worth the wait, a solid 4/5 star film in my book. and while everyones not going to like this, (esp the ending) the only way you can enjoy this film is to see it for what its trying to tell us on how humans react to fear. like it or hate it, Stephen Kings the mist has finally descended.