Film Review – The Mist
Title: The Mist
Director: Frank Darabont
Year: 2007
Genre: Horror
Format Reviewed: Bluray
Since I’ve seen my last Stephen King-based movie (parts of Stephen King’s Nightmares series), I’ve actually read a Stephen King book: Cell. It was pretty good once I got used to his writing style, but the biggest thing that I noticed was his use of stereotypical, annoying characters (not including the protagonist, thankfully). The Mist suffers the same fate. Though there is definitely a deeper message in the movie’s story, the ‘pure enjoyment’ portion of this movie, especially the horror aspect, suffers from predictability and a lack of power.
The Mist is in a few ways similar to M. Night Shyamalan’s recent work (The Happening and Lady in the Water). The characters contrast each other so much that it’s hard to believe any of them are real. At least in Shyamalan’s movies, this doesn’t become a distraction. And similar to The Happening, the characters are often overacted or overly pronounced within the story. Perhaps, this is due to using Stephen King’s literature as source material. Stephen King also seems to use a lot of product placement to make his alternate reality relative to his audience, but it just comes off as cheap in the movie.
Unlike Shyamalan, who has become very good in building tension, The Mist isn’t able to build tension at all. The horror aspect of The Mist is a failure before anything really interesting happens. The plot element of the mist is a good idea and I feel like it could have made for a great movie, but something was either lost in translation or poorly executed. Without giving away spoilers, the real force behind the mist is revealed at a good pace, but it just doesn’t grab you as terrifying the way it could have. A whole movie based on the mystery of the mist may have made a great film, but the audience isn’t really given a time to reflect on the mystery or really feel the fear felt by the characters. The special effects are actually quite good and help the movie believably unfold, but the characters’ reactions ruin the encounters with the mist. There are too many times to get frustrated and think, “OMG get moving!!” or “why don’t they just…??”
In the end, the only good scenes are ones where people bite it and when no one is talking, which takes up less than 10% of the film time. So in my view, this movie could cut an hour, turned into a short, and be worth watching. As it stands, The Mist is a below average, popcorn movie for the masses. It definitely tries to lay on deeper messages of how people deal with fear and the obvious relation to recent American politics. In fact, this part is not done poorly, but for a horror movie, there are more enjoyable movies than The Mist.
Rating: 2 /5
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