Warning: Spoilers
I suppose I’ll start with The Mist as it’s the most recent film that I’ve watched. If I had one word for this film, it might be “formulaic” – I mean the plot involves monsters from another dimension terrorizing a small American town. I won’t say too much about the ending other than that whoever wrote it couldn’t resist a bad one. Thematically the film is one that fits well with post-911, post-Iraq paranoia – odd given that the novella is the better part of a quarter-century old. Nonetheless, the parallels are irresistible. The monsters in the mist are difficult to spot and there is some question as to whether some of the protagonists somehow brought them into being.
The performance in this film that actually stands out is Marcia Gay Harden as the psychotic church lady – you know the kind, even ardent churchgoers take pains to avoid them. I haven’t been to many movies where the crowd cheers when a villain is killed, but there was a round of applause when her character was offed. If you push the 9/11 parallel (something that I might rather avoid) she stands in for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson trying to establish a causal relationship between terrorism and gays.
That said, no one performance can save this film from its formula and its nearly cartoonish monsters (big spiders! big moths! tentacles!) I rate this film a “meh.”
Filed under: movies, reviews | Tagged: film, reviews, The Mist
