The Mist: Post Release (spoilers) - Page 3

I have to say I'm very surprised that this isn't getting more love from critics. It's at 69% over at Rotten Tomatoes (not that RT is the end all, be all of critical opinion, but it's a useful guide as to the general critical feeling of a film) and that to me just seems way too low. Here we have a smart, well-made, honest-to-God classic in the making horror movie and it's practically dividing critics down the middle. I was so sure this was going to get a lot of love.

It takes years for most great horror movies to register on the radar of critics. They still consider it a "ghetto" genre. THE MIST is no different.

I agree with you about Patricia Clarkson, but Marcia Gay Harden's face has always kinda annoyed me. This movie did not help me 'like' her. Ha ha. But her talent is undeniable. Similar to Laura Linney... great actors, but not someone I'm really attracted to.

Ebert's review is baffling. I don't think he even likes horror/monster movies that take themselves seriously for a change.

I respect Ebert; always have and will. And I still enjoy reading his written reviews. Not to mention, I miss him like Hell on At the Movies. But I stopped listening to him seriously after his infamous Crash hard-on.

As for The Mist, I agree with the poster above me saying this will be respected and loved in the coming years via home video and T.V. (i.e. just like The Thing and Darabont's own Shawshank Redemption!)

Is that the same song used in the extremely depressing portion of Baraka? Because I've never been able to hear that song without thinking of people sorting through trash, sleeping on grates, and being in general miserable and ignored by the rest of humanity.

Fucking amazing movie. I lucked out with my audience, which was a big surprise as the theater near me is usually populated by loudmouth obnoxious pricks with no class or semblance of taste. I hit up a late night showing and the theater was half full, and it appeared everybody enjoyed it and appreciated the magnitude of the end. The place lit up when Harden's character got plugged. After th end, everybody filed ourt quietly and somberly, just as crushed as I was.

And yeah, one hell of a bleak ending. The great characters, acting and tension was not ruined for me by the poor CGI at all. Aside from the first appearance of the tentacles on the loading dock, I didn't even really notice any problems with it. The effects served their function.

Wow. THIS is how you do an adaptation: keeping everything that worked, jettisoning everything that doesn't, then adding your own things that actually improve the story.

At first, I didn't know where they were going with the lady going out for her kids in the beginning. I must confess to completely forgetting about her, and then WHAM; she shows up at the end. It's almost as if she had her own different movie, one where she saved her kids and everything was alright and SHE got the happy ending our characters didn't.

Adding the stabbing death of the soldier was a nice touch. In the book, their murderous blood lust happens kind of randomly, but here, it's triggered by something that makes sense. Hell, even David was pissed at the soldier for lying, and that provided the stepping stone for a lynch mob. It just escalated and escalated until the butcher (an actual character in the book, nice job!) stabbed him; I love how, at first, it seems almost accidental, like he just fell on his knife, but then he keeps stabbing him over and over, and then if that weren't fucked up enough, they throw him the fuck out! Jesus!

And damn, was this movie fantastic at giving you a very large cast of characters yet never making you forget who's who or lose track of them. Filling the roles with a lot of "Hey! It's THAT guy!" helped too.

And thank you, thank you for keeping the old lady with the spray can.

Damn, I can't add anything to the ending except that, it's strange how the book's ending, where help DOESN'T come, is more hopeful then this, where help actually DOES come.

I loved the movie, but if I had to rate it, I'd give it a B+. Honestly, I think most of my issues with the film weren't flaws in the movie, but just things that go against my own personal grain.

No real order to these, I'm just getting my thoughts out in a semi-coherent matter. I apologize for the length.

- I understand that the point of the film/story is "If you go into the mist you will dissapear and get your dumb ass killed", but I would have liked to have seen more docile, just-passing-by shots of some of the creatures. Creature-wise, my favorite moments involved creatures that just were - the mosquitos and the Giant One At The End.

From what I understand, King thought of The Mist when the mall he was in suddenly was covered in fog, and he imagined a large monster flying outside. Why not put some in? Some shadows?

By basically having every creature attack the nearest human (except when its someone that has to survive, of course), it takes away some of the personality (for lack of a better term) from the creatures, and turns them distinctly into monsters from a video game.

There were a few times where they did this right. The flying creatures that got into the mall were fine, when you could tell that they were just hunting the mosiqutos and unaccustomed to the clifffaces in his native world shattering. There was one mini-scene where one of them was half flying half walking, trying to bite a close mosquito, ignoring the human near him. That worked.

The spiders-in-the-pharmacy also worked fairly well, since it made sense that these creatures would make some webs, wait for things to walk by, and attack. The tentacles KINDA worked; I could understand it pushing the door a little, but I can't accept it suddenly realizing the door is open 2 feet and shoving half of itself inside.

When didn't the creatures work? When the one of the flying creatures crashed into the mall, landed on a human, and proceeded to eat him. When the Pharmacy Spiders not only blocked the exit to the pharmacy, and when more of them appeared, far from the pharmacy, at the end. When the Giant Ass Crab Thing suddenly appeared the minute Arrowhead Guy went into the mist. I could practically hear the good-old Half-Life "creature teleporting in" noise.

I think the issue, centrally, is that if you make the creatures intelligent, they would have been dead in five minutes. If you make the creatures feral, 90% their behavior would be "Run Away". The movie (and the story, I suppose) try and have it both ways.

There, done with that one.

- The ending. I'm not a fan of "if only we had waited 2 more minutes and we would have been saved!" endings, because they pull me from suspension of disbelief. Am I supposed to believe that, only two minutes from his position, none of them could hear a bunch of military units using flamethrowers (and in the background, a couple monsters that I think would have made some noise during their killing), multiple trucks, a couple helicopters, and a motherphyrexian tank?

Problem is, I'm not exactly sure how I'd end it. My immediate idea is either him running through the fog while the credits roll, but another idea I think would be interesting (if it could be done without being cheesy or too sci-fi) is it he found a Mist Hole (something subtle, maybe just a floating black hole with mist spewing out) and so crazed with the desire to die by a monster that he flings himself into it, hoping that whatever is on the other side will kill him.

- I almost bought into the Crazy Christian Lady, but still was too much of a sledgehammer. Having her not be attacked by a mosquito was a brilliant Way To Convince People She's Right, though. I think the minute she started demanding sacrifice, someone would have put her down.

- Rule #1 for defeating an extrademential horde of monsters that seemingly generate their own Mist: As soon as you begin wiping it out and clearing the fog, send in the civillians into the areas you've not yet cleared. Even if you're still burning shit off the trees, IT IS SAFE FOR THE PEOPLE!

..

By the length of this, it seems like I hated the movie. I loved it! I just like to talk.

Yes. Easily the most depressing part of the movie, with the cute little kid begging for money. Every time I hear it, I immediately get sad. Just like every time I hear 'Goodbye Horses' I get a hard on, I mean...I feel like something gross is about to happen. Darabont even used the slow motion-mourn used in Baraka and all the other Fricke/Reggio family of movies.

The Mist kicked ass. Man, that ending - that's old school story telling. I'm talking Brother's Grimm shit. I know people are going to hate it, because that ending makes you feel sick. I felt sick, but I loved it.

They heard noise, but figured it was a creature. Thus the ending.

All I heard was two squawks, and fairly distant squawks at that. For me, it's completely unreasonable for the movie to try and convince me of the following things all at the same time:

* The military was 2 minutes away from their location
* They were able to hear animal noises faint enough that implied the sound came from a great distance
* They were unable to hear noises from helicopters and gunfire, two sounds which I would argue are distinct and recongnizable sounds
* They were unable to hear noises from a giant-ass tank

Don't get me wrong, I understand what the ending was supposed to convey, but it didn't work for me.

It reminds me of this PSA I saw on MST3K. The point was train-related safety, and they said "how long untll you hear the sound from this oncoming train"? Wait a few seconds, and a train comes from behind], blaring its horns.

The problem? They dropped out the audio, so you wouldn't hear the train coming from behind. it wasn't authetntic, so it wasn't believeable.

I agree partly with Scumbag about his discontent with the ending, but I'd argue that feeling of "If only they'd waited... IF ONLY!!!" comes from us caring about the characters so much.

And as I suggested before, the Jesus freaks' premonitions of doom had so seeped into their sense of hopelessness, that they were not in the right frame of mind to mind their surroundings in a rational manner.

Question: Were any of the religious zealots on the trucks at the end? I expected them to be, but got distracted when I saw the lucky-ass mother with her kids.

I have to admit, I hated the ending until I read this. It makes complete sense, and considering the symbolic nature of the rest of the film, it's something I should have immediately recognized. Hell, my problem was that I didn't understand why they didn't just try walking and see how far they could get - but that's the point.

So, my score for the film just went up a point or two.

I'm going to assume you just quoted my whole post without actually reading it:

It's not about realism, it's exactly what you said it was - suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief works when the movie world is consistent within itself, and I don't feel The Mist did that for me in terms of creature behavior and the Impossibly Silent Army.

If I had to describe the way I look at movies, I'd say I'm a flavor-oriented worldbuilder. Everything the movie provides to me adds another piece of information that helps me see the world the movie is trying to show me.

For me, the movie established itself not as something largely allegorical. The creatures in the mist were not a modern variant of the Grue, but simple animals that accidentally wandered into a world that wasn't their own.

For example, I loved the scenes with the mosquitoes and the Flying Things before they crashed into the mall. I immediately got the picture that the mosquitoes rested on natural clifffaces at night, and the Flying Things hunted them. Even when an unseen creature finished off the Biker's legs, it fit the picture of a creature that wandered by, smelled something good, and ate it.

You may disagree, but I strongly feel the movie was asking me to make a huge jump from those previous creature experiences to Omg-Humans-Attack situations. Like I said in the original post, the non-terran animals turned from creatures to monsters, harming the movie for me.

As for the Christian lady... it would have been must scarier and more appealing if she wasn't firebreathing seconds after the Mist came down. Calm and almost reasonable, the viewer would have almost been tempted by her sermons, much like the other people in the mall.

How interesting would it have been if the Christian Lady only went batshit at the very end, and it was one of her closest follower - that other redhead one that said "YOU MURDERED HER!" - was the one that stopped the fighting by knocking out the Christian Lady during the final conflict?

Finally, I agree that the very last one was picky, but I meant it as a joke. The second I saw it, my girlfriend leaned over and went "aren't they moving those folks into the mist again?"

I'd write more, but I have work to get ready for

I've been thinking about what to say about this movie ever since I walked out of the theater last night.

DEFINITELY in my Top Three for 2007 and, holy, who knows if it'll sneak into my Top 25 of All Time.

Point-by-point:

1) Am I the only who didn't hurl at the sight of the tentacle CGI? I mean, jeez, it wasn't ILM but it sure as fuck wasn't "made for TV". The only disappointing thing about it was that they didn't use the practical tentacles that showed up in all the behind-the-scenes stills they released during production.

The rest of CGI in the movie wasn't distracting at all. Everybody here is making it out to be of A Sound of Thunder-proportions.

2) Loved the The Thing homage when the old lady burns the spider and it scurries away around the corner. I dunno if it was already mentioned in this thread, but still, I wonder how many people would've gotten that.

3) All hyperbole aside, Thomas Jane was REALLY great in this. I haven't seen Stander, but the guy really made an impression here. If the awards shows had any real balls they'd nominate this guy. Fuck that it's a monster movie, the guy eclipsed more than half of the acting that went on this year.

4) Unfortunately, the ending was spoiled for me months ago when it was just a rumor, but seeing the non-spoiler hints made it obvious that the "rumor" was true. So, I expected it... but, damn if it still wasn't powerful. I loved how it was done, just the quick bursts from afar and then his wail. Goddamn powerful scene. And I loved the framing of that shot of Jane next to the open door and the tank appearing out of the mist. Not too far away to be grand, but just perfect.

4) For the record, big cheers when Christian Lady got hers over here as well.

5) Shout-out to Andre Braugher, who did a fantastic job here and I don't see getting enough rep.

6) After thinking about it, I think I'm gonna agree with Russ on the whole "movie is about losing hope" thing. It makes sense and, more importantly, feels like something Darabont would aim for.

*****

Sad to see so many people shitting on this movie. The IMDb boards are full of jackasses and retards spewing the most dumbass comments you could imagine. Also, the critics and the "ungrateful teenage shits".

I didn't by any means hurl at the site of the CGI tentacle, but it was definitely distracting enough to take me out of the movie for a few seconds. Did it ruin the scene for me? Not at all, as a matter of fact I was tense as hell during it, but for a moment I didn't know what to expect if the rest of the CG was that bad...

...which it obviously wasn't. The bugs, "pterodactyls", and spiders (especially that spider that gets on the hood of the jeep at the end - fuck that thing looked scary) all were fantastic, and I'd say that the rest of the CG looked pretty fuckin' good considering the budget.

I have to go see this again. At first I wasn't sure I wanted to, given the ending, but I know too many people that would be all too happy to see a movie like this finally hitting the theaters.

I'm just a bit upset that The Mist, as good as it was, didn't have the best CGI around. The film just freaking deserves it. Why should Pirates of the Carribean have some of the best FX work and The Mist doesn't? I guess that's what's more disappointing to me.

As for The Thing, if people couldn't put two and two together with that spider and the movie poster of The Thing seen at the beginning of the film among David's artwork, I don't know what else to say.

I feel your pain man - I use to work at that theatre and attended alot of movies there before & after my employment. It seemed like every movie I went to at that theatre there always was a group of little bastards laughing or making stupid comments throughout the movie. I eventually just stopped going there once a discount theatre was built near where I live(Wauseon), because the prices at Showcase Maumee just became to ridiculous to afford.

As for the movie, I agree with the rest of you that its the best horror movie of the year(even better than 1408)but I really wasn't too crazy about the ending. I thought after they saw that crab-like monster walk past the vehicle, above them, that everybody in the vehicle would shift their focus towards the gun(to signal that they lost hope)and David would be the only one not up for that option. Then they'd show the outside of vehicle as the camera slowly pans away from it then it would fade to black - leaving the conclusion to the viewer's imagination.

Toby Jones putting 2 caps in Marcia Gay Harden had to be one of my favorite parts in the movie, after it happened I turned toward my dad(who was seated next to me)and said "Dobby just went Terminator on her ass".

I too don't understand the shit that this film is getting. In my opinion, everything about it is exceptional and it is easily the best horror movie that I've seen in a long time. The ending is pitch perfect as far as I'm concerned.

People are idiots.

I guess you could say Tom Jane just wants his wife and kid back.

I've been wondering all this time why Dimension didn't give what I figured wa s sure fire hit (at least on DVD) more than $20 million. I'd almost bet they offered Darabont another $10 million if he stuck with King's ending. Having said that, the ending fit. Theme-wise it's honestly a good companion piece to Shawshank Redemption. One says that so long as a man holds onto his hope, he will end up alright. The the other shows what happens when a man lets go of all hope.

I'm really surprised by the division over this movie - the ending does kind of come out of left field in a Twilight Zone sort of way, but tonally it fits.

I kind of agree with Scumbag about the creatures. I had similar thoughts, and have had them everytime we see an "alien ecosystem" movie. Why is every alien monster in the movies always a) hostile and b) constantly hungry? Even a fucking crocodile or bear isn't going to relentlessly eat everything it sees. Obviously alien creatures would be both creepy and deadly, and their stings or bites would be more likely to be fatal, but there would still be some creatures that just plain ran away or ignored you. We got the gigantic turtle-crab in this one, but that's it.

It is a nitpick, obviously. Just something that always bothers me about alien movies in general. One of the reasons the ALIEN films are classics is that the creature's life cycle is logical (um, aside from the fact that it apparently grows without eating). It'd be nice to see someone work in that mode again.

Nevertheless, a great, emotionally shattering movie. And yes, I'm pretty much ready to see Darabont tackle a Dark Tower...let's say "miniseries," right now.

Well, one of those insects certainly ignored Carmody. Stupid bug...

Also, I didn't know Toby Jones was the voice of Dobby!

My best friend saw the movie with his girlfriend the day before I did and he admits to breaking out laughing at the end.

Thing is, he loved the movie to bits. He said he laughed because he couldn't believe the movie went THERE and he just couldn't find a way to express that except to guffaw.

I remember when I "screened" Evil Dead at my apartment for my friends (it was a horror movie night). My friend laughed, as well, throughout the whole movie. Like, tears rolling down his cheeks. He was making jokes left-and-right , blasting the movie.

Later, when everybody was hitting the hay he was all fidgety and spooked saying how the movie freaked him out and now he was pissed-scared the freaky laughing chick with the clown smile would jump scare out of some corner.

I remember my dad explaining to me, when I was a kid, that people laugh at horrible parts in movies because they are scared. I was thinking of his explanation when watching The Mist this weekend. When I think of it that way, I don't feel as offended.

No, I get the laughing thing. Fortunately, the laughter at my screening was nervous laughter. You could feel the audience, which was in fact made up mostly of wiseass teenagers, being won over. At the end I noticed more than a few of them looking pale and shaky as they left.

Interestingly, from the short story:

One {tentacle} curled around Norm's flapping red Federal apron and tore it away. It disappeared back into the mist with the red cloth curled in its grip......I thought of that tentacle waving Norm's red apron around, and I got laughing. I got laughing, except my laughter and Norm's screams sounded about the same. Maybe no one even knew I was laughing except me.

Of course it doesn't compute. Computation is rational. Human beings aren't rational.

And for something that I'm not sure if it goes into the Extremely Tiny Nitpick box or the Genuine Question box: I live in the midwest, and what the people experienced in the movie is called fog here, not 'Mist'. Is this a regional thing, or was it just the term King used and they kept it?

In about 10 minutes I'm meeting a buddy of mine and his girlfriend for a showing of this, my second, their first. My buddy's girlfriend...no wait shit, she's his wife now. Christ, they've been married for a year and 2 months and I was IN the fucking wedding and I still can't remember it's his wife.

Anyway, she's the type that HATES unhappy, bleak endings and despises any movie containing the death of a child. Oh boy I can't wait to see her reaction.

Tell us everything when you get back! I love seeing movies totally 'go to work' on people who won't like it but can't deny that it affects them.

My only complaint with this exceptional film is that we got to see the entire giant creature at the end. It was too small. The impression I got from the novella was that the creature was so big all that could be seen was a foot. Nit-picky, I know.

Is anyone else pissed that the trailers very clearly show the military rolling down the street in tanks and burning shit? Kinda ruined the ending for me, and my friend who hasn't seen it now knows the army shows up but not in what context. Of all things why would you give away the ending in a 30 second spot?

I'm guessing that they're trying to sell this as a traditional "civilization against a supernatural force" movie and hide the fact that it's a "watch Thomas Jane ice his own kid, two senior citizens, and a grade school teacher needlessly" movie.

This was the case at my theater too, thank god. At first they were doing the usual laughing at wrong things and talking and checking their cell phones...then as the movie went on they just got quieter and quieter. They cheered when Marcia Gay Harden got shot, and there were very audible gasps when the shots in the car were heard. And when that tank rolled up...God, it was great to have an audience so involved in the story like that.

It really pisses me off to no end that HITMAN will probably make more money than this. I'm seeing this two more times with different friends, and I can't wait to see their depressed little faces. The way I figure it, if a movie like this comes along and you know it ain't going to make a lot of money, it's your responsibility, no matter how strapped for cash you are (I know I am) to see it three times.

Not nit-picky at all, my friend! The thing that made giant foot so scary was that it was so big you couldn't see the rest of him. Add the fact that his foot left a six foot crater and that they didn't see where his OTHER foot landed, and you've got a very tall beastie.

That's exactly what it is, but unfortunately it's going to spoil the movie for a lot of people who near the end of the flick are thinking to themselves, "I know I saw them in the preview, when are the guys with the flamethrowers going to show up?"

That happened in 1408 to me. I knew the fake ending couldn't be real because there were a bunch of shots in the trailer that hadn't happened yet.

Well she didn't freak out like I thought she would, but she didn't say a damn word while walking out of the theater. She didn't even say "bye" when we parted ways. She hates me.

Just as good the second time around btw.

And you know what I'm really tired of: folks that, during a HORROR movie when a scene comes in which characters are in danger keep yelling "RUN! Oh they're SO STUPID JUST RUN!" This happened during the pharmacy sequence. When the spiders appeared the people behind me carried on like Thomas Jane and co. could hear them. I understand the whole "damn if I were them I'd high-tail it out of there" mentality, but a convention of the horror genre is that people DON'T high-tail it out of there. If they did YOU WOULDN'T SEE ANYTHING. Who wants to see a horror movie where all the characters do is run away and never fight? That sounds pretty fuckin' boring to me.

Unfortunately, it seems like every fucking horror movie these days has characters who run away and never fight. Sometimes they die. And then the bad guy trips and falls off a cliff. The end.

In defense of such behavior, you could just see it as the movie working like gangbusters on them. They wouldn't be so vocal if they weren't into it.

In the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview book, Hitchcock spoke about the reaction one of his films had on the wife of someone he knew. During a particularly tense sequence, she grabbed her husband pleading him to "Do something!"

I remember reading something similar about Polanski's use of composition in Rosemary's Baby (my details may be a little inaccurate). There was a shot in that film of a room through a partly closed door and Polanski could see the engrossed audience lean to the side in order to see past the door. I love stories like that!

In your case, I can see that kind of audience participation getting on my nerves. I guess it really depends on my mood and how exactly people are reacting.

And people don't ever seem to understand the concept of people freezing up in stressful situations. You face giant spiders and tentacles that you've never seen before and let's see how well you react!

I thought this at first, too, but now that I mull over it, it was simply more cinematic to have the camera getting a wide shot of this enormous beast walking by the car instead of, y'know, a couple of legs.

Couple other thoughts on the feel-good movie of the holiday season:
If my musty memories of the novella serves me, there was a love scene between the main character and the female lead that wasn't in the movie. Good. It made the guy look like a bastard, especially not knowing what happened to his wife.

Though I don't think it was mentioned explicitly in the movie, I also recall the characters figuring out the creatures were detecting the humans by scent or something like that. There were implications to that effect but otherwise you're sort of left wondering why the creatures don't just barrel into the supermarket to find food (except by accident).

The scene with the tentacles in the back: The room should've been separated from the main store by at least a hallway or a closing pair of doors or something more than a bunch of plastic streamers hanging from the ceiling. They're screaming and hacking away at a monster in the next room and then after they're all, "Okay, don't tell the others what just happened." C'mon. The entire store heard that ruckus.

I can't help but wonder if people would be dumping on the ending more if this were an M. Night Shyamalan film.

This ending was way subtler than anything Shyamalan would be able to come up with.

Strangely enough about 3 minutes before reading this my girlfriend told me the same thing after I voiced my complaint to her. I had thought about that as well, and it's natural for the audience to react in such a way. I guess the thing I couldn't get past from the people behind me is that they weren't just yelling "RUN!", they were actually complaining that the characters weren't running. "Oh they're so STUPID" and "This is SO STUPID" is quite a bit different than a good spirited "oh crap, RUN!"


What Owen said.

I just realized, after discussing it with my girlfriend, that the ending was even more silly than I thought it was.

It wasn't "If only we had waited 2 minutes and we would have been saved" - it was "We just drove through a military outpost and not a single person stopped us, even though we sound like a car and had our lights on."

I recreated the ending panorama from memory - excuse some of the minor things like more soldiers that I'm not sure about. Also, I compressed a bit in terms of time to get everything right.



Whats that? Temporary military shelter?

If you see the movie again, look on the right of the screen. You'll see a white temporary housing complex - kinda like this, billowing in between the trees. Forgot to add them to the picture, but I believe I saw some soldiers standing in front of it too.

The shelter held the people - including the Mom And Kids - that would pass Drayton.

Not only do you have to ask things like "why didn't our people hear the tank and helicopters behind them the whole time?", you have to ask "where were these military people when a car drove by them in the mist?" The answer, really, is that they weren't there.

Word to the wise: don't think about movies that you like, because when you do, you notice too much.

The Shymalan ending would be that the survivors find out that they have been on a different planet this whole time!

Fucking wow. I had heard this film was... successful. I was completely unprepared for that final 20 or so minutes.

I got way lucky with my audience. No undue laughter, no bullshit. When the tank appeared, it was like all the air in the room got sucked out. There was a collective intake of breath, and lots of murmured "Oh my God" and "Holy fuck..." Incredible experience. I have never left a film shaking like that before (closest was probably The Fountain).

HOWEVER. I do think the first act is really, really uneven. I thought, as did pretty much everyone in my group, that the acting and pacing for the first third were actually sort of bad. It worried me at the time, but after seeing what the movie eventually becomes, it's absolutely forgiven.

The tentacle CG was for shit. That's really the only major stain on the film for me. It looked about "Deep Rising" quality, though the actual creature design was fantastic. I really would like it if they could fix this for the DVD, but I'm not betting on it.

Was anyone else sort of surprised by the creature designs in general? The bugs and spiders did not look anything like I was expecting. It wasn't bad, but it didn't have that "organic" feel that I expected to be repulsed by (I think I was expecting something closer to the Bug Pit creatures in King Kong). I didn't care at all for the design of the Pterodactyl creatures. No biggie, though.

Every favorite moment from the novella was intact, and generally better than I could have hoped for. The giant creature at the end was a real treat.

I loved, loved, fucking loved the music playing over the final scenes. I had no idea it was trailer music, which is sort of too bad, but it really worked for me. I could have watched them take a whole road trip through devastated, mist-covered America to that score just fine.

Ms. Carmody had everyone in my theatre in an uproar. It was really pretty fantastic. My sister came out of the movie still just FUMING about her, and raving about the ending. This movie is a fucking SUCCESS.

EDIT: Lawl, did anyone actually read that chart two posts above me? Guy, you need to let this shit go. Nobody cares.

The song over the final scene is "The Host of Seraphim" by Dead Can Dance. They've got some decent stuff if you're into that kind of thing, but I haven't really listened to the album of their's I bought last year more than once.

I'm so sick of my friends bashing this movie. That's partly why I've been pretty active the past few weeks - I can't have intelligent conversations about movies with them.

Thats why I named it "yeah, I'm bored" :-P Like I said I love the movie, but that ending... it insults me in a way I'm not used to feeling.

My friends didn't really "get it".

One said "it was a good monster movie". Really? What!?

I didn't even need the bare, nasty social commentary to like it. I knew I'd like it when I noticed Battlestar Galactica camera tricks, the intimacy developed with even minor unnamed characters, and the desparate, tragic heroism of David Drayton.

I didn't miss some of the stuff they took out of the novella. And I loved where they went with the ending. It's one of the most audacious things I've ever seen in a movie, and as I cared about all those characters I just felt sick to my stomach and started to imagine the bleak, and probably short life Drayton would have after what he'd done.

But on every level the movie was working for me. The whole time, even during the sketchy CG tentacles (and I wasn't aware of the low budget).

That said, I don't want Darabont anywhere near The Dark Tower. He may have the balls, and proves as much with The Mist, but does he have the insane, uncompromising vision?

I'd like to see King continue his love affair with Marvel and bring the DT series to full graphic novel form before it ever finds its way to film/miniseries. That way, I'll have the GNs if someone fucks up the movie/series :P