The Mist: Post Release (spoilers) - Page 2

So, what the fuck did I do to Frank Darabont? Did I kick his puppy at some point? This film has the blackest, most gut-wrenching ending I've ever seen.

I've become a pretty dark individual, so the ending didn't surprise or disturb me in the slightest. I pretty much saw each bit coming at the end, and while it was extremely well done it didn't effect me the way it did you guys or the people I saw it with. Personally, I think it would have been cooler ending with a gigantic foot walking across Maine in front of Jane, from a creature even bigger than the Godzilla-sized crab. But again this is a Darabont movie, which means it's about hope, in this case that you must never give up hope no matter how bad it gets.

That's not what I took from the ending at all. It's the despair that his son could have lived if he'd just waited and not given up. I'd say that's infinitely darker than the idea he walks out and there's another monster there to take him out.

just got back -- the film's special effects were pretty poor, thanks to the low budget and that did hurt my ability to enjoy the early scene where Norm is killed. Some of the later stuff was good.

Overall, i felt Harden's character was too easy to dismiss (i think i'm agreeing with one of the CHUD reviews but I forget which one). By the time she's killed it's just too long in the making.

I'm not sure what the ultimate moral of the story is -- losing faith? losing hope? it seemed like there were alot of messages about modern society being thrown around (use of fear, religious fervor, military hubris) that didn't fully add up toanything. i walked away thinking these ideas were just people clutching at explanations, whcih would have been fine if we didn't get an actual explanation (as soon as I saw the military guys I knew there would be a scene where the private somehow knows "what went wrong.") I think the film would have been fine without the "they opened a door" and "we all heard rumors" excuse.

I think the last 20 minutes really makes the film. some of the visuals are awesome (the huge four-legged creature, the shot of the jeep as the four shots go off).

Well, they were hearing noises in the mist after they ran out of gas, even though it turned to be the military vehicles, everyone in the truck figured they were fucked. They pretty much lost hope and Jane's character probably figured it be better for his son to die quick then get killed by whatever the fuck was in the mist.

Ebert fucked up.

I was doing my Jeffrey DeMunn impression leaving the theater. I staggered out, trying to get my bearings.

The crowd I saw this with also laughed during all of the wrong moments, whether it be during some dialogue or, more noticeably, during Jim and Myron's reactions after Norm dies.

I loved Toby Jones, Frances Sternhagen (where the hell has she been?), and Jeffrey DeMunn, who I have a bit of a soft spot for because he played Captain Esteridge in The Hitcher.

Attention 9:15 audience from the Cinema Deluxe in Maumee, Ohio:



FUCK YOU!

Did you people think that you were buying tickets to Scary Movie 5? Because you sure as fuck were laughing your asses off throughout the movie enough. Is people falling down that funny, even in a dire context that you have the uncontrolable urge to guffaw? It was almost enough to make me swear off going to the theater for a good fucking while. Every post in the "talking back to the screen" thread came back to haunt me, and every annoying theater stereotype was represented tonight. Thanks.


But as awful as this audience was, I found myself more immersed in the movie going experience than I have in a long while. Darabont must have been pissed, and it showed. This was an unflinching look into the descent of hopelessness. There were a few moments, such as with the already discussed tentacle, that were a bit dodgy, and moments where the ugly side of humanity teetered on the edge of cartoonishness (scene with the sacrifice of the soldier), but Darabont was wise enough to pull back and allow us to sink back into the situation this group found themselves in.

Marcia Gay Harden was incredible, and at times almost sympathetic, which allowed for the belief that in this given situation, people might actually cling to what somebody like this had to say. Tom Jane did a phenomonal job as David..... I agree that this is his best performance since Stander.

The only thing I was left wondering is if the ending would have been more effective if David had just walked into the mist after he mercy killed the rest of the group. Because everything just seemed so bleak for humanity in general that the film may have been better served with a more ambiguous ending. I still love the fact that seeing the survivors and military coming from the mist just mere moments after David's ordeal must have crushed whatever soul or spirit he had left, but it still lets the viewer know that although David's world is crushed, humanity still prevailed.

Six of one, half dozen of the other, I suppose. But I really felt the gutwrenching that this ending delivered.

Awesome, awesome movie.

ETA: I see I'm not the only person who had the "laughing problem" at my showing.

This from the guy who did "The Majestic"????? That ending was all kinds of wrong. It was like Frank was twisting the knife. Holy shit what a fucked up ending but I love him for it. Give this man the Dark Tower series. He GETS Stephen King.

Yep, people cheered when Carmody got shot in my theater did too. My favorite scene was the "stoning". Hilarious.

I didn't really have a problem with people laughing, though there was this one cunt would chuckle every now and then, I'd just think what the fuck is so funny.

I'd like to mention I thought the lack of music worked really well. Also, A little thing I liked was after "The Host of Seraphim" finishes playing during the credits, it goes silent other then the sound of military vehicles and helicopters.

Did anyone else get chills with the Dark Tower poster? I think this is the first SK film to actually acknowlege that series. FD bought alot of good will (which was needed for the poor CGI) from me with that little nod.

I thought that was a pretty cool touch.

yeah, I've been a fan of his ever since Silent Rage.

I love this film, it's so angry. it may well be Darabont's The Thing, but in the bargain we also get Darabont's Romero style people-can't-communicate siege movie. Tom Jane is flawless (if I'm not mistaken those are real tears when Drayton makes that promise to his son) going to an even darker place than Tim Daly at the end of Storm of the Century, and because of him the last few minutes gave me that awesome inverse cathartic buzz that only the most depressing down endings can provide, and I left the cinema in a happy daze.

I hope this does great business.

The film gives the two best reasons for gun ownership: killing lower-food chain Lovecraftian monsters and killing Jesus freaks. NRA4EVR!

Can we just draft FD to remake every SK adaptation that Mick Garris fucked up? Please? One thing that I've noticed about Daranbont's SK adaptations is that he actually improves on the source material. You can't say that about most directors.

Poor CG starting with the tentacles took me out of the movie. If you're working with a small budget, maybe go the less is more route and not show so much. Use of animatronics would have been nice.

Yah, Frank has never been scared to go dark in any of his movies.

Just my personal opinion. I admit that I only had 2 hours sleep at the time.

Loved the movie until the generator room though.

Ebert's never really been reliable on most horror, come to think of it.

I really hope they work on the CGI more for the DVD release. The film is quite wonderful by itself, but perfecting that FX would only strengthen it. As it stands, best film I've seen all year. Darabont screws with your emotions more than I thought he would.

It's funny though, it got CGI fire right...

Best horror movie of 2007. I totally forgot there were monsters involved at times... bold.
Tentacles were the only cgi I didn't like.

So you loved 20 minutes of it?

Did a double feature of this and No Country yesterday and I did The Mist first. Walking out, I really wasn't sure whether or not I could do another movie right away; I almost returned my No Country ticket. I forced myself to No Country though, and I think I'm a better man for it.

In regards to The Mist: holy shit, what a movie. I tried to prepare myself for the ending (I read enough to know it was bleak and depressing but held off from spoiling it fully) but it still took the wind out of me. When he's loading the gun I was thinking "there's no way they're going to go there" and then they went there. I couldn't believe it. Then when the army shows up I got numb. As much as I loved this movie I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch that ending again.

What was great about that ending (and what made it jet black funny) was that it did a reverse Deux Ex Machina (or however you spell it). In most movies, the military would have arrived just in time before anything bad could happen. Here, they come a few moments too late. All said and done, above average movie but the last 10 minutes makes it a classic. Still can't believe they went there. The military showing up was just fucking mean.

One of the best horror films in the past 10 years. I have no hesitation mentioning this with ALIEN, THE THING, HALLOWEEN, etc. as an instant classic of the genre.

The ending is magnificent.

Someone mentioned how they just wanted all the violence in No Country to stop. Here, once the army guy gets shanked... it was almost making me sick. Even though I read the story already, Carmody was working on my last nerve.

I'm sure it gets a lot of laughs in theaters from idiots, but I thought the part where they pull back the legs on a string was terrifying.

The spiders got me. I've always hated spiders.

Once the movie got going, my heart rarely stopped pounding. I don't know how I feel about the ending. It punched me in the face, for sure. It's just so so so mean! You see the mother that leaves early on in the truck with her kids... SLAP!

I projected so much of myself onto the characters during the ending. "No no no! Just wait a little longer! Kill yourselves when the truck is swarming with monsters! Just a little longer!!!"

In the end, I feel that the crazy fundamentalism "won out" by creeping into their hopelessness despite them fighting it the whole film.

Oh, and in relation to the Badass thread. That grocery bagger was a total badass! I'll shout out "BADASS!" to the heavens for that guy! He was the punctuation for all the moments of tension. When he killed Carmody, I whooped and clapped.

The comments about the substandard CG gave me some doubt about the movie, but it turned out to be totally fine. Those first tentacles were a bit iffy, but there was nothing to bothered me too much. Everything else was top-notch enough to help the film.

The CGI was so Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. THAT was the only negative to this thing. So since this is a spoiler thread, what are your thoughts on what the "bleak ending" was going to be? My guess was

(swipe)That they were going to succeed in sacrificing the boy and the Mist at that moment clears (swipe)

Haven't seen it yet - don't worry, I know the ending already - but I just read this and had to ask:

How often does this happen in the movie? To this day I can't watch certain parts of Day of the Dead because of the whole flesh-being-ripped scenes.

EDIT:

Some minor trivia: Valve looked very closely at The Mist (the short story, that is) when designing the thematic elements of Half-Life. I was reading this very long, professional interview with Mark Laidlaw (which I'm really pissed I can't find, its on my computer SOMEWHERE) in which he said that he wanted to be able to read The Mist, replace "Arrowhead Project" with "Black Mesa", and the story would still work. They weren't able to show it, but they wanted to paint the picture that people in the Half-Life world were also dealing with Mist-like situations, and the better Gordon Freeman made the in-facility situation, the worse he was making it for people outside of the facility.

The blood/gore is surprisingly limited. The flesh-tearing occurs during Norm's tentacular demise and when one dude gets gnawed on by a pterodactyloid.

The Sherminator got tentaclinated.

As the movie went on, I figured:

(swipe)The car would run out of gas, and they'd eventually reach the 'we'd rather die' decision. There would only be one round left in the gun. So the adults would get out of the car and disappear. Jane would kill his son, freak out, and the last shot would be him walking into the mist.

The army appearing just made it so cruel.

I'm eating Thanksgiving dinner with my family, and I'm still consumed with the ending of this movie. It does put things in some perspective, I'll tell you that.

In my opinion, this has been a fantastic year for movies.

Well, Darabont's batting record with King material is now 3-0. The Mist is in serious contention with Gone Baby Gone as the best film of 2007 for me.

Jesus tapdancing Mel Gibson. That movie left me numb. Seriously, I walked out of the theatre feeling gut punched. Just an incredible bit of filmmaking, and one I wish we'd see more of in this genre.

One sticking point, though: I fucking HATED the score. Can we please stop using the Wailing Woman Of Extreme Sorrow in every fucking movie? The ending, with Thomas Jane screaming, would've been better if the score didn't make it sound like he was competing for audability in the sound mix with that damn woman. Bad CGI and a few questionable lines aside, that was the only part of the movie that made me go "Really, Frank, I wish you'd done something different."

Other than that, though, it was a fantastic bit of horror. Thomas Jane and Toby Jones both kick massive amounts of ass, the latter literally so. It was great to see such a normal looking person get to be the badass in a movie.

Toby Jones isn't normal looking. He's fuckfaced. He was great in this though.

See No Country for Old Men.

You know, I instantly recognized the music in the film. It's trailer music. And more specifically, it was trailer music for Terminator 3's second international trailer.

The only really noticeable part of the score is what ended up being Lisa Gerard's voice. So THAT was trailer music? It wasn't composed by Mark Isham?

I'm not sure how I feel about the wailing. It certainly felt tragic. But it also felt like it belonged in a Michael Mann film (or a Ridley Scott film).

I really appreciated how a lot of the film wasn't scored. It made the tense scenes even more unbearable. No music to cushion the fall! Then... music cushioned the fall.

About Tom Jane's screams at the end... I have no idea what it would be like in his character's situation, but something about those abrupt shout/screams doesn't really work for me. Can't really explain why. Not every scream due to child loss shouldn't be like Pacino in Godfather III, but Jane's scream didn't really hit me.

Yes I swear to you it's trailer music. I even think I've got it downloaded on my computer somewhere.

Anyway, I thought the shouts worked for his character. I mean he didn't just loose his child, he lost his wife and he intentionally killed everyone in that car. I know at the time everyone thought it was for the best but like everything that could go wrong went wrong for this character. What else was he to do? Look off in space lookin sad?

I thought the exact same thing. This film is probably the closest we will get to a Half-Life movie.

Really liked this. Very efficient and nasty piece of work. No fat on it and not a bit of camp. The pharmacy spider scene was excellent (wish they would have kept the image of the old lady swatting the spiders away with a tennis racket).

The most chilling part of the new ending is the fact that I probably would have done the same thing. In fact, I was even wondering why Jane didn't just smother his son and save that last bullet for himself.

Really effective, if bleak, horror film. My only concern is that it may not be much of a "repeat" viewer.

http://www.terminatorfiles.com/media/video_t3.htm

Scroll down and download Domestic 2 trailer. That's the one with the same music as The Mist.

Direct link: http://www.terminatorfiles.com/media...2large-mov.zip

The song is "The Host of Seraphim" by Dead Can Dance.

Thanks, I do have that somewhere. I remember the title!

Wow, I think this is the first film I've seen where humanity is saved at the end of the movie and it makes the film bleaker.

Fuck.

Jesus Christ, that movie kicked my ass. As soon as the gas ran out, I just went 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.' That ending sucker punched me in the face. Brilliant.

Oh, and never, EVER, see this movie in a theater full of ungrateful teenage shits. "Saw IV was better." I heard one of the bastards say afterwards. And they wouldn't shut the fuck up and were laughing the whole fucking time. I know they aren't reading this, but FUCK YOU, you assholes! Damn near took me out of the movie. I will give them one thing: Marcia Gay Harden taking one in the face: standing ovation. I am now reminded why I don't need to go to church.

Brilliant movie. And as said above, who would've thought humanity winning would make things even worse? Thomas Jane was brilliant and...gah...I don't know what else to say besides 'awesome'. And I fucking love 2007. I'm going broke from the sheer quantity of awesomeness.

Go Capote (that was the guy who played Capote, right?) He was the best.

Thankfully I saw an early matinee of this today, and it was pretty sparsely populated. Maybe 20-30 people in the whole screening. Everyone else was either seeing Enchanted or at home eating turkey.

An added bit of awesome: The Dark Tower poster Thomas was working on in the beginning was obviously one for The Drawing of the Three. Meaning The Mist takes place in a world where we've already gotten a Gunslinger movie. Why can't this be a reality?

Watched this movie today. As I walked I heard a group of people call it a horrible ending. One guy kept repeating it over, like it was some great pronouncement. I guess most people want the happy ending. I thought it was god damn awesome. Comparing it to the Thing was right on. This movie was so damn bleak. It had the hopelessness of the Thing, but an even darker ending (and in theory the monsters lost!). This movie is really sticking with me, can not get its ending out of my mind.

I hear ya. It was supposed to come this Wednesday (it was posted online with show-times for the past week and a half). Wednesday rolls around, and No Country is gone and instead we get another week of The Game Plan!?!?!

I asked two different people working there (one on the phone and one face-to-face) what was up. And I got two different asnwers. Long-story short, I'll have to wait till next week at the soonest to see it. Goddamnit...

So would I, Fresh. So would I.

Which would you say you prefered, Nick?

Which was more entertaining?