I can't look at the specifics of your post Chuck because I have not seen the movie yet. BTW are you a horror fan per se? I don't remember seeing you in too many horror movie threads.
Is your response to the movie solely predicated on the ending? The book version was open ended - would such an ending shift your overall opinion much?
Every man is my superior, in that I may learn from him.
I like good horror. I'm a mood-type guy, not gore.
The horror elements in The Mist are exceptional. I don't mind a tough horror film, which this most certainly is. I am genuinely unimpressed with most horror films these days, so I rarely see them in the theater.
Again, this is by no means a bad film. Were the ending more open-ended, I would probably be a much bigger fan (as I really liked and admired 98% of the running time, if not more). I can't really discuss what didn't work for me about the end at all. Any mere hint would spoil the film at some level, which I find highly distasteful. I've had to be quite careful in what I have said already
Once folks have seen it, I can be more specific. But yes, my gripe is ending-specific. The film itself is quite good. The horror aspects are horrific. There are no easy deaths in the film...each is graphic and excruciating and awful. The horror fan in me admired that. It added to the sense of alienation and despair.
As a parent, it hit me like a punch in the gut! It was wrenching! And it worked for me. Reminded me of the bleak ending from 70's movies, ie Electra Glide in Blue, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Race With the Devil, and at the time we were in the middle of a war that polarized the country as well. I don't Darabont was consciously replicating that, but face it, we live in bleak times and movies often reflect that.
Think of it as a cautionary tale to NOT lose hope. See--
Spoiler:
David gave up too quick. They all did. Almost all of the deaths in the movie come because they were motivated BY HOPELESSNESS, not hope itself. David, to escape Carmody before she kills them. Brent, to prove David wrong. The twist there at the end, the punch in the balls I referred to, comes because of the one person in the movie who let her fierce hope shine, she is vindicated. She left that supermarket and she was vindicated.
Darabont is slick because he makes all this hopelessness on David's part look like it's the right course of action. But it's a course of RE-action. Hope doesn't really factor in--and he pays for it.
That might be one interpretation you could look through.
And yeah, my bad, I'd forgotten Pet Sematary. Probably on par with this movie. But I was speaking more about the fact that King never wrote anything as mean as THIS MOVIE feels.
I'd love to see it that way, but I can't. The MINUTE they run out of gas, he goes for the gun? Not even a moment to spend with his kid? Not a few hours to eat groceries? He was motivated by hope when they left. I agree they were leaving Carmody, but he really thought they might get somewhere.
As for the mother he saw...she was motivated by guilt and fear when she left. She left her CHILDREN alone...with the oldest being 8. That's pretty irresponsible. So I don't think hope pushed her out of the store. I think it was terrified guilt.
I see that as a viable interpretation, but it doesn't gel with my experience as a parent
Maybe No Country (the last film I saw...I need to go see Enchanted ) has me thinking in terms of fatality and "mote of dust". I don't know. I appreciate that thought, RA. But as I said above...it needed to push a little farther at the end for me to buy that.
Yeah, the instant I saw it, I knew that no amount of set-up was going to make this forgivable for some. No matter what, for some, that is going to be an unearned ending. It's not a knock, it's just--people have their thresholds when it comes to entertainment.
I'll say this though, for Darabont:
Spoiler:
I honestly thought, for a split second there, he wasn't going to cut outside of the car. I thought I had like an extra 2 minutes to go in there. I thought I was going to watch this guy, with blood splattering on his face, one-by-one kill the people in that car. I was actually mildly RELIEVED when it cut to the outside and the first flash went off. And then I was sickened again
I think the lack of wait between the gas running out before they look at each other was made plausible, tonally, by how FAST the movie was running at that point. It only seemed like a hasty decision AFTER the movie ended. At the time, I was totally wrapped up in it.
True though:
Spoiler:
there's guilt involved with that woman. But there's determination and caring, as well. She felt bad, but not bad enough to give up hope that she could fix it. That's a different KIND of hope, but it's hope nonetheless. Maybe desperate, but desperate hope is better than none at all. I don't think David was really HOPING for anything out there, he was just trying to get away before Carmody stabbed his kid. As far as groceries go--they didn't grab em, did they? I don't remember Ollie taking em after shooting Carmody. Which didn't happen in the story, if I remember it right. She lived. This is how black souled this movie is: People willingly CHEERED when Ollie took her out. An old bag boy shot the religious zealot in the gut and in the head before running out to the lovecraftian horror from planet x and they CHEERED.
My friend at the screening called this: It's not gonna make any money at the B.O.
But neither did Shawshank.
People will come around. I'm pretty sure of it. And the filmmaking is pretty damned good, regardless. I know he took the crew he used on the Shield, but this felt like Battlestar, to me. It was sorta satisfying to see the tone of those shows realized in a movie theater, and to see that people weren't ready for it.
