standard monster movie with a slightly elevated tone

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2012)

Essentially an unaccredited remake of John Carpenter's "The Fog," "The Mist" is a 50's style B-monster-movie done with 21st Century special effects. It's the oldie about a group of random strangers trapped in an enclosed space - in this case, a local supermarket - while some unknown threat lurks in the world outside. But because it's based on a Stephen King novella, it comes with a veneer of deep-think philosophizing to make it seem better than it actually is.
It all begins when a strange mist rolls into a small New England town, harboring within it a menace of an indescribable and deadly nature. Local artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) is the requisite everyman character who becomes the agreed-upon leader who helps the people trapped in the store cope with the crisis.
For the most part, this is standard-issue stuff, with each of the stock characters falling into his or her assigned role - be it the soon-to-be-proved-wrong skeptic, the soon-to-be-cut-down-to-size (in some cases, quite literally) big-mouth braggart, and the curled-up-in-a-fetal-position quivering jellyfish, among others. Heck, there's even an annoying scripture-spouting end-of-days religious fanatic (deliciously played by an over-the-top Marcia Gay Harden) who gets on everyone's last nerve, and who is really just the crazy ornithologist and her drunken detractor from the diner scene in "The Birds" rolled into one and then writ large.
The first half of the movie is filled with people doing and saying some truly unlikely and stupid things, but the second half has a bit more bite to it as it explores the ways in which desperate people will turn on one another through fear and superstition, and, in so doing, become a greater threat to their own survival and safety than the thing outside. But its bleak, oh-so-predictable "ironic" ending makes us pine for the days when "The Twilight Zone" managed to do this sort of thing on a weekly basis with a whole lot less hyperventilation and fanfare.