Movie Review - The Mist

As bad as previous attempts at King's books. I'm a big fan of Mr King's books. Movies based on his books though? Not so much. People get them wrong and screw them up and I wasn't expecting this to be any different. The film starts VERY slowly, we get a little bit of character development, learn about some character relationships as well. Then the sirens start going and we get our 1st warning about The Mist and that someone has already been got!

We also have the 1st person to run for freedom to his car and once he's covered by the very fast moving Mist all we then hear is screaming. Generally the film likes to lead you by the nose as if your really stupid or actually retarded. Stuff like showing us the fireaxe on the wall as Norm gets grabbed by the tentacle. I don't need the film-maker to tell me what he's going to be doing in a few moments. I can watch it for myself, I'm intelligent enough to actually watch a movie.

Obviously Norm was going to die but the monsters looked like very bad CGI and not much money was spent creating those shots. The 1st law of horror, hide your monsters for as long as possible then show as little as you can, revealing tiny bits until you see the whole thing near the end. That's been thrown right out of the window as we got to see the tentacles very early.
Obviously opposing groups are formed and the group that wants to leave does so (I'm amazed that not one of them carries a torch into The Mist to try and see any better?) but their all killed (the scene with the rope is pretty cool!) and the religious nut that has already been scaring folks and preaching the end of the world is just fired up even more by this occurrence.

Once night starts to fall we see our 2nd type of monster (the dragonfly thing) and the even bigger dragon thing. Sadly these monsters suffer the same CGI issues as the tentacles they just don't look very real (especially the dragons & even more so when their on fire & flying). Although David & his son are fighting for their lives what shocks & amazes me is neither of them have expressed concerned for mom at home all on her own and this is halfway through the movie!

When David's group go out for medical supplies their intelligent enough to take torches with them. Here we meet the spider monsters (How did they not spot the web stuff all over the columns before they ever found the MP?) & they steal a page right out of Aliens with monsters using live human hosts to incubate their young. Eventually we find out the monsters and The Mist are all the fault of the military doing some experiment on a local base and its all from another dimension.

Once most of David's group reached the truck I did wonder how they were going to stretch the movie at least another 10 minutes. Going back to David's home its covered in the webs and we see the wife cocooned and they decide to see if they can drive out of The Mist on what fuel David has left. Obviously they run out gas and start to contemplate suicide but only have 4 bullets to kill 5 people (obviously someone would sit with the little boy in front of them and kill 2 with 1 shot). This slows down the movie at the wrong place, right now we either want resolution or confrontation and this lull was a really bad idea. Pulling away from the truck we see 4 shots fired then going back inside we see only David left alive who gets out obviously wanting to be killed by what's in The Mist.

I'm not going to describe the ending but I can't remember the book well enough to know if that's the same ending or not but it's a pretty dire and weak ending. It's not much of a resolution at all in my opinion and quite an incredible cop-out considering the effort and time that was spent on the rest of the story. Not recommended even to King fans.