WOW what a surprise!!!

Rating: 10/10 (6 July 2008)

I'm not above taking in the cinematic equivalent of big mac and fries now and again, and this is what I was expecting from 'The Mist' - a gloriously cheesy, morbid blood-fest to delight both with gore as well as ridiculousness.
Wow: I had to sit in the cinema 5 minutes after the credits rolled in sheer shock.
Don't get me wrong - a few of King's works have been made into cinema's best films ('The Shining' and 'Shawshanks' come to mind), but of course any c i n e a s t* knows the majority of movies 'based on Stephen King' can be savoured only by those few who have a soft spot for the awful tradition of Ed Wood.
However, King's great films have been based on his great works - and any student of King will tell you 'The Mist' was rent-payer: probably one of those works that Mr. King would cheerfully tell you he ground out in a hurry to pay the collector before they came to throw him, Tabitha and his newborn out on the street sometime in the 70's. It's a short story (now called a 'Novella' because King's so famous - believe me, when it was published it was a 'short story') with the plot that a bunch of people are trapped in a super-market being attacked by a bunch of creepy monsters.
Seriously - that's the plot.
So I cheerfully tripped into the cinema after a day on the beach ready for a laugh only to be drawn into one of the most compelling, profound and disturbing films I've seen since 'Monster' (sorry, no pun intended, the last great film was called 'Monster' I can't help it). I'm still trying to figure out whether this film is really a '10' or just a '9' that seems like a 10 simply due to the thrill of being so surprised (but hey, 9's pretty good if you're just paying the rent, right?).
OF COURSE you're saying 'doh, you call yourself a c i n e a s t* and you didn't know you were about to see a Durabont?' to which I can only say 'doh, how could I have know Durabon would try to make something out Mist?
The film takes you down the darkest of roads, where you think you know who's side you're on, but finally shows you that courage and hope are never goals you've achieved, but need constantly to attain again and again. The claustrophobic, paranoia-ridden setting of all the real action seamlessly shifts during the course of the film from a mundane location to a microcosm of American itself as it is perceived today - under siege - with the characters personifying the responses, escapes and denial mechanism Americans of all classes are turning to to deal with the situation they perceive they are in.
Amazingly, the film corresponds almost exactly to my own (and I venture to say any King fan's) visualisation of the story - where the worst monsters are not the creatures besieging the people but the people themselves. The story is closely followed, that is, up until the very end, when the full force of the film's moral message strikes, and you realise the the supposed heroes of the film have also taken their own monstrousness with them - the seminal point being when a gun is retrieved in a cliff-hanger moment. Durabont has made this simple, collateral occurrence in King's work to the doom of the ostensible heroes in the horrendously deviant ending he has given to the film. Thinking of current affairs during the film, it occurred to me then that - just as Barack Obama says Americans are turning to 'God and Guns' in their despair - there are more than one way to fail the challenge of being human.
It is then that you find the true heroine of the film left early on, only to return, mutely and momentarily, to bring us to the sudden realisation that courage consists of facing any monsters there are for those which you love, and of not losing hope.
Having said that, I should warn real gore fans that the monsters are crap - none of King's morbid fantasy has been kept (well, perhaps the tentacles at the beginning and the big thing at the end). It's like Durabont purposely wanted them to correspond more to the common man's nightmares than Kings unsettlingly unique visions in order not to dilute the film's moral force... I really missed the 'crazy racing stripes' on the spiders...
*IMDb's spell-checker doesn't recognise the term 'c i n e a s t'... how droll...