November 26, 2007
the mist
From the moment the first tentacle comes winding out of the mist, everything's lost. The film, especially in its attempt (mildly updated from the original story) to be an allegory (albeit a confused one), makes a lot more sense if we never see the actual beasts.
Never mind the standard-issue Irresponsible Government Science Unleashes Cataclysmic Result narrative, which hasn't gained much charge since Godzilla (though still promises some interest, in its increasing incoherence). The main allegory, organized around King's passionate if undeveloped dislike for charismatic demagogues of apocalypse, concerns what horrors humans perpetrate on each other, given certain opportunities. It involves Marcia Gay Harden in a burdensome role as prophetess-harridan. Her early diagnosis of the mist — "it's death" — and her leveraging of inchoate fear toward religious violence would be far more interesting (and resonant) if that fear stayed inchoate, if there remained a rift of possibility that it was in fact nothing.
But the mist turns out to be a mere soup in which monsters bob about; obviously, in a smarter movie the medium would be the message. King's (and Darabont's) failure to grasp this, even in the midst of trying to make an oh-so-adult point about how the scary monsters are the other humans, turns out to be an exact measure of their adolescence.
Posted by jane at November 26, 2007 08:55 AM | TrackBack