Subject to Change

I wanted to blog about The Mist after I saw it, but couldn’t think of a way to do it without ruining the end of the movie.  I started writing a blog once and quit when it was accidentally erased from my drafts. Given Stephen King’s recent comments about the military I don’t really feel like I owe him anything, so I’ll go ahead and say what I thought of his crummy movie.

A strange mist, haunted by murderous creatures has a town held hostage. A group of people trapped in a grocery store struggle to escape and discover the nature of their plight. It suppose it was a classic King movie in most ways. There were plenty of rubber monsters and overly dramatic acting. Many of the characters are rather annoying, either frustratingly stupid or totally unbelievable. It’s hard to empathize with any of them, except maybe the young boy and his father. 

Many of the people hiding out in the grocery store are slain before some of them band together to escape. They’re led by the man who is determined to get home in order to save his wife. His son is with him, and they escape together with a woman, an elderly couple, and a gun. The five of them drive to the man’s house, where they discover that his wife is dead. Lucky for him there’s a new woman in the car, right? Well, not really. This is Stephen King’s movie, after all.

The escapees attempt to drive beyond the mist only to run out of gas. This is where the movie made me mad. The gun is loaded with four bullets, but there are five people. While his son is sleeping the man volunteers to go last, then he prepares the gun. As he brings the gun up, his son’s eyes open wide in disbelief and the camera exists the car to show the four shots fired from outside. I suppose it could have been worse, but the wide-eyed stare of the child was quite enough. It made Kelly and I both shout out loud at the TV.

As I said in a previous post about Stephen King, there are times when I feel like I know what inspires his writing. I think this scene is exactly what he had in mind for this movie. It’s probably supposed to be a message about gun control, and it doesn’t end there. After killing off everyone else in the car the man tries to commit suicide by rubber monster, only to have the mist clear around him and the military come rushing in. You see? He killed everyone with that evil gun for nothing.

I really feel like The Mist was a total waste of my time. It wasn’t all that suspenseful and the ending wasn’t too surprising.  I prefer it when Stephen King sticks to just being weird, over trying to be scary.