Stephen King's The Mist - Review

Idiot movie.......

The ending, people killing people and tried to kill himself because they were afraid to be killed by monster.

Idiot... just idiot

Stephen King is idiot

Idiot movie.......

The ending, people killing people and tried to kill himself because they were afraid to be killed by monster.

Idiot... just idiot

By about 25 mins in I was crying.
This film is shockingly bad.
If you've seen it you'll understand, it was like a bad story being read terribly lol
I'd give it about 1/10 from the first 25 mins, I'm not watching the rest.

Trash of the highest order. I just wanted to see what people had to say as i was shocked at how amateur and unoriginal this was. What a waste of time. As for the ending i didn't see it as we turned it off as soon as the hilarious monster made an appearance at the supermarket. The pathetic set up of the 'lord of the flies'/moral dilemma/armaggedon rant in the supermarket was an absolute joke. The scariest thing about this movie is anyone who could watch it with a straight face and relate to such cliched and idiotic characters.
A couple of minutes in after the long family gaze (yawn) over the lake and the 'he's my enemy, soon to be friend', conversation with the neighbour, i thought it was possibly a comedy. I had to re read the dvd case and realised it was stephen king and therefore probably trying to be taken seriously.
I love horrors and b-grade but come on. However if i stumbled home blind drunk at 3am one morning with friends and it happened to be on it could be amusing to drink beer eat pop corn and have a good laugh. The 'predict the next scene', game could possibly be fun with this one too.

Trash of the highest order. I just wanted to see what people had to say as i was shocked at how amateur and unoriginal this was. What a waste of time. As for the ending i didn't see it as we turned it off as soon as the hilarious monster made an appearance at the supermarket. The pathetic set up of the 'lord of the flies'/moral dilemma/armaggedon rant in the supermarket was an absolute joke. The scariest thing about this movie is anyone who could watch it with a straight face and relate to such cliched and idiotic characters.
A couple of minutes in after the long family gaze (yawn) over the lake and the 'he's my enemy, soon to be friend', conversation with the neighbour, i thought it was possibly a comedy. I had to re read the dvd case and realised it was stephen king and therefore probably trying to be taken seriously.
I love horrors and b-grade but come on. However if i stumbled home blind drunk at 3am one morning with friends and it happened to be on it could be amusing to drink beer eat pop corn and have a good laugh. The 'predict the next scene', game could possibly be fun with this one too.

was i the only one who questioned on how that lady from the beginning of the movie made it out of the mist without dieing? i mean cause like she went all by herself, helpless wanting to get home to her children. and then at the end they show her in the military truck resucued with her boy and girl. wierd much? i wanna know how she made it! and i wanna know how the military got to her at her house (which was only a few minutes away from the grocery store) and they didnt even get to the grocery store! it drives me insane thinking about it.

Not every Movie ending is a happy ending. This ending was wicked, he didnt want he son to get eaten by monsters but personally i would have tried to fight a bit longer, if he just waited five more mins lol. Great movie though

I enjoyed the film except for the ending. Screw those of you with your attempted deep thoughts. They are misdirected at this film. It's basically a Hollywood monster flick that lacks a good Hollywood ending. This leaves mostly everyone, critic and average movie-goer alike, unsatisfied. As in any King story, I liked to see how the characters reacted to the ever increasing stresses of the situation. The ending marked the protagonists' ultimate point of desperation. The same could have been achieved without the unrelentingly miserable downward emotional spiral. If the movie ending has to be different from the book, here’s how I think it should work (SPOILER ALERT!): First, set it up earlier during the store monster battle that the gun is prone to jamming. It could misfire as a creature approaches, tension builds, and then the gun discharges normally on a subsequent pull of the trigger. Jump to the ending. The decision for all of them to end it in the vehicle is made. The consensus is that the boy, being asleep, should be the first to go so as not to be frightened. The father points the gun. We see him driven to his limits as he strains and pulls the trigger. Gun jam! We now are at the same level of understanding of just how far the father has been pushed as in the original ending, except that everyone in the car is still alive. The father aims the gun a second time. We’re primed for the gun to fire this time, the hammer lifts and….cue rumbling. They all turn. They see something moving in the mist. Enter cavalry! Not complicated. Not unnecessarily morbid. Just good Hollywood storytelling for the popcorn crowd.

Love the movie although the ending wasn't wat i expected (or wanted)

Don't get me wrong people I think all Stephen Kings movies/books are good. The Mist was good the only thing I didn't like about it was the flying thingy what was that a bird demon from hell or something I don't know but that toucan beak wasn't all that scary looking.

"Right On" sounds a lot like Mrs. Carmody; irrational, ignorant, possessed of fundamentalist beliefs and totally out of touch with reality. The greatest force for peace in the history of the world: The United States Military!"?! What a nut job!

As for the movie "The Mist", it's not great but it's not BAD either. It's a lot better than the nudity filled slasher/torture trash that's so prevalent in horror films today.

Andre Braugher was miscast as Norton. In the novella he's a fiftyish, rather self-absorbed white guy; he seems stubborn and ego-driven and misguided, but he's not nearly as hateful as the movie version. Braugher plays him as a total bastard.

The special effects could have been better. The tentacles looked rubbery and did not have the sucker-mouths that were described in novella, although it looked like something sharp was on their undersides. The bugs and bug-eating monsters and spiders were not as described in the novella either; they looked made of metal, and moved in an unnatural "animated" way. The monsters in the book were much more surreal and otherworldly looking.

In the novella there are two young men in the market in army uniforms. They commit suicide by hanging themselves. Ollie and David speculate on why they did it; they mention rumors of something called "The Arrowhead Project" at a nearby military compound. They wonder if what they were doing up these created the mist; could they have been fooling with high intensity lasers and knocked a hole in another dimension? And that's it for the army angle. That's IT. The whole army thing was really inflated in the movie.

In the novella, Mrs. Carmody is an old, haggish, superstitious woman who runs an antique shop. She yammers on about the end of the world and doom and destruction but she is NOT a religious fanatic and does not ceaselessly spout Bible nonsense. She does say the only way to survive the mist is with a "blood sacrifice". She gains a few followers but the people in the market don't turn into a bloodthirsty mob like in the movie, although at one point they seem to be turning that way.

The ending...I liked the ending in the book better. They were in a dire situation, but there WAS a slender hope for them all. The survivors in the novella were David, Billy, Amanda, and Mrs. Reppler.

One scene from the movie really stayed with me; the scene where the huge lumbering monster is walking though the mist. Very effective scene, very haunting and scary. Imagine being in a car, in thick mist, and seeing THAT coming at you.

And the music towards the ending...I thought it fit the situation very well. To the people who didn't like the music at the end I ask this question: what do you think would have been better? Heavy metal? Rap? Madonna singing "Live to Tell"?

All this crap about "The Mist" being a terrible move is just that...crap. As a movie going experience you could do a LOT worse.

It was a 4 star movie until the last 2 minutes. The fallowing transcript portrays my perception of the ending in a rather unique format that you may find appreciable given the lack of variety in the hundreds of reviews above.

[21:56] Ss: I gotta say
[21:57] Ss: apart from the ending
[21:57] Ss: the mist was awesome
[21:57] tls: The ending was good
[21:57] tls: Better than the book's
[21:57] Ss: didn't the book just end with them frolicking off into the fog
[21:57] Ss: and assumed death
[21:57] tls: It was ambiguous
[21:57] Ss: yeah
[21:57] tls: This one was darkly ironic
[21:57] Ss: I’m amazed Steven king didn't object
[21:57] tls: He loved the new ending
[21:57] Ss: "sorry it turns out the extra dimensional creatures have a weakness, bullets"
[21:57] Ss: "whoda thunk it"
[21:58] tls: Flames
[21:58] tls: They used flamethrowers
[21:58] Ss: the only way that ending could've been more faggy
[21:58] Ss: was if the crazy bitch
[21:58] Ss: was wheeled by
[21:58] Ss: smiling
[21:58] Ss: with bandages over her forehead
[21:58] tls: HAHA
[21:58] Ss: singing "surprise cockfag"
[21:59] Ss: I appreciate the brutality of the ending
[21:59] Ss: I don't appreciate that we are to believe that the 5 passengers didn't hear the hum of tanks
[21:59] Ss: the firing of projectiles
[21:59] Ss: smell smoke
[21:59] Ss: or hear the sizzling of heat
[21:59] Ss: or the cries of molten-slagged critters
[21:59] tls: Haha
[21:59] Ss: without the grit and the physics
[22:00] Ss: the ending is arbitrary and stupid.

Frankly the ending is such an outward display of vulgar sadism that it near completely drains away the merits of the film and respect for the director. Its possible that he is not a sadist and simply wanted to rip off a twilight zone cliché, or perhaps took a leaf (tree branch, birds nest and eggs) from George Romero's 1966 Night of the Living Dead. Either scenario is inexcusable.

For those under the 'other' persuasion, be it because you are a morbid teeny bopper so consumed by the rising tide of popular entertainment to no longer recognize where art ends and profanity begins, or reasons I dearly hope are more legitimate. Please consider just how utterly flawless this movie would have been if the car ran out of gas the camera shoots to the 4 bullets in David Drayton's hand before zeroing in on Amanda, Billy, Dan and Irenes faces before fading to black, it would be a beautiful ending, especially since one of Draytons paintings visible in the beginning of the film was a promotional poster of "The Thing…"

God bless.

I first heard of this movie back in 2004 or 2005 i think and thought wow cant wait for this movie, and earlier this year i bought the Stephen King novel Skelleton crew where the story is actualy in i read it and got addicted to it, for a short story.

Well its almost 3 years along the line and we havnt even recieved the movie here in South Africa and im starting to loose hope, i had high hopes for this film . But some of you guys said the CG sucked and if the CG sucked then the acting will suck.

Thomas JAne is a great actor, but has been very quiet recently dont know why. Dont see an actor tacking such a role if he knows the limitations of the budget... oh well i guess ill just wait abit longer... And i see you guys say the end is diffrent. Well the ending in the book is aopen crap ending and nothing can be worse than that right?

Yup, that was an idiotic ending alright.
It might have played better if they were about to be eaten before taking themselves out.
But to do it the way that they did, without being under any real immediate threat, just didn't ring true.

And the Dad just seemed completely out of character to give up so easily.
Lazy ending.

I am not a King fan. My husband is and the only book I read was Rose Madder, loved it!

I picked this movie because I love horror shows but this one I could have and would have done without had I any idea of the ending. I believe that scary or even shows like this should be realistic to a point as to what we would do in certain situations. I feel that for the way our "Modern Society" works for us the producer or writer were dead on. When you take away the things we take for granted such as our security (hence 911 calls) our power and lock us in a place of impending doom then things will unfold just as they did. The Crazy lady that makes everyone believe she is the voice of God when just hours before she was the town nut. Humans want so bad to know there is something to take us to better places that when it comes close to the end we decide we need to follow something, she was a true fanatic and sacrifice is always there answer.

The ending! I think along with most other comments. As I said, I picked this movie and usually it would have been my husband who is the KING fan, he reads all his books, the book left the ending open for us to decide there fate, I was so pissed at my husband and at KING himself for the ending that all I could do at 130am was stomp around the hose and try to take my mind someplace else. Couldn't sleep and tried all night to come up with my own endings. The movie haunted me and I will never watch a King move again, along with the other person of the ending, nor would I ever recommend them to anyone. Unfortunately I do work in an environment of a lot of such cases, would you try this one, do you recommend that one?

Just the ending, just the damned ending ruined it all for me and my family, my husband the King fan in the family even lowered his head in dismay, my oldest son looked at me and said he was sorry and it sucked. He, 14 said he is not interested in Mr. King. I think we need to look at the person who re-wrote the ending. This was bad, real bad, taste and anything eles I could add.

This movie should have had warnings to it, I am a mother of six and just could not handle what I saw, if I would have known, and I trusted my husband in saying I would like it, because he knows my imagination and with the book it left it open, damn it, it left it open, and I could have built my own ending as he knew I would, but to have a young boy who wakes up in the arms of a women he feels safe with to look at his dad who made him promises and all the horror he has already seen and then nothing but blood and gunshots only for the Calvary to come and save him? That is not horror, that is not scary, that is not even a parents worst nightmare, that is tasteless and pointless, as a mother it makes you want to throw up!

I saw the film on dvd last night and I agree with Minky about the first minutes of the film being lame and all that. The dialogue and some of the logic didn't quite work for me but I loved the premise. I thought the ending was shocking but appropriate. People would do all sorts of things to survive.

Hi, people, excellent opinions...

Please excuse my english, My native language is spanish

I just saw the movie in dvd.

I did not know it was Frank Darabont. When I was watching it, I liked the way it was being developed. When the tentacles appeared, I was dissapointed, and I thought "This is another horror movie". Later, with the Bugs, I was more interested, though I did not like the big prehistoric bird. What I really like wer the reactions of the actors, the way they were expressing emotions. The inner conflict in that supermarket where the human nature was in discussion. I loved Marcia Gay Harden performance, and I had that sensation that the proble wern't just the mis, but humans in conflict with no rules, no punishment, drunk with religion and fake hopes.

Thinking in that way, I beagn to love this movie since they returned from Pharmacy, with Jessup confrontation. And to be honest, From the moment when they finally space and get in the Car, with that emotive music, a song named "Host for Seraphine" I thoug the movie was perfect. I loved the whole scne with the mist, that music, that look in character face, that mess when normal guys began to fight each other and killed a religious leader.

And for me, the whol problem is that woman talking about revelations and the end of days. Perhaps, main characters were so scared, so desperated that they didn't think so well. Just picture being in that situation for 2 days, with that chaos with your neighborhood, where some religious fan kill a man without a good reason; Where real monster does exist and it seems you don't have a chance.

So, in the end, when they see that Huuuuuge and big monster (for me, the best scene of the movie) I don't know what kind of hope these 4 people could have. Remember, hen they do the collective suicide, they were hearing monsters steps approaching, they though it was really the end. And with that fear, well developed by actors and the director, it is understood they could do something so pointless.

I would prefer an end not so mean, perhaps they waited int the car until the monsters or what ever arrived, something not so cruel, something left open. But I loved the way this end was done, artistically speaking...

Regards for all of you

Saw the film last night. Just in Theatres in Ireland now! First 30-40 mins was awful. A general rule of thumb is if your not hooked after 10 mins then it's curtains. This just looked like a straight to TV production that you'd watch for a few minutes and then scramble for the remote as quick as possible to change the channel. Early Acting was terrible! Delivery of lines by lady looking for help to get home to save her kids was some of the worst I've ever seen. CGI for tentacles was laughable - an inflated balloon with a pair of tights over it would have been more believable. The arguement about the existence of this "monster" which followed was so fake. The point blank refusal of the so called well educated lawyer to go into the loading bay and see the evidence of the piece of tentacle was incomprehensible. Not all bad though! - The religious Nut gave a fantastic performance - I wanted her hit/killed for ages which shows how believable she was in her role. The rest of the monsters were quite well done and at times the suspense built up to entertaining levels. I personally liked the ending. Good twist but a bit contrived the way the mist seemed to lift within seconds after he had done the deed. In summing up the film is too weak early on but if you stick with it you'll be moderately entertained. Would still expect alot more from the Director that brought us The Shawshank Redemption.

Ok so i saw The Mist in all the ads and i waited till Netflix go it so i could watch it and scream all i wanted. I was scream at the top of my lungs when the religeous lady kept on talking. I wanted to kill her, but thats good acting. I L.O.V.E.D the movie until the end. That just defeated the purpose of me watching the movie. So that i could just be depressed at the end. I think not. I thought that the ending was so bad that it ruined the rest of my day. On top of that I thought it was TOTALLY unnessasary to decive the veiwers like that, i hated it. I rate the movie a B because it had great moments but the end just screwed it up. The movie would have been 100 times better if the father only killed the 3 older people not his son. Him killing his son was the most devastating of all. The movie, good, the end, HORRIBLE.

wow, i always knew that american audiences didnt like a non happy ending, but i never really KNEW until i read some of these comments. Yes its a horrible ending, its supposed to be. they were placed in an impossible position but i 'liked' it, it gave the film closure. the only other outcome was that they all die any way cos the mist was world wide. with this ending, though unbearably bleak, it was also able to offer hope.

It was a b movie that punched well above its weight. yes there was some dodgy dialogue and acting and the SFX were generally poor (i have a good imagination to compensate for such things) but this was more than compensated for by moments of good acting, characterisation, gripping narrative and twists. when the mad woman got shot most of the cinema applauded, and NO ONE applauds in uk cinemas any more. Thorughly recommended if you go with the right attitude. its not the worst film ever made, neither is it the greatest, but it is very good. View it as an extended Twilight Zone episode and not another effects heavy film like Independence Day and you'll be happy

Went to see this film last night with my partner and i can honestly say i have never in all my life see such a bad movie!!Just sat there thinking ill give it a minute and maybe it will get interesting.................How wrong could i have been!!!DON'T GO WASTING YOUR MONEY!!!Never seen so many people get up and walk out of a cinema!!Did not even see the end but i can prob guess what happened seeing as the whole film was predictable!!!

It is very fascinating to read all the comments about the "bad ending". If you grow up a little and try to be emphatic about the sitution that Jane's character is put in, I don't think anyone would have acted differently.

What is interesting is that so many of you who hated the ending is so honest about it; don't you realize that many of you act just as the characters in the movie that deny what is happening.

If I were a young college student majoring in psychology, I would do a summary of all the comments on this page. It could serve as a non-scientific view on how citizens in the U.S. regard their surroundings.

Just wait til Hancock hits the screens - and see how you'll like that one....

It is very fascinating to read all the comments about the "bad ending". If you grow up a little and try to be emphatic about the sitution that Jane's character is put in, I don't think anyone would have acted differently.

What is interesting is that so many of you who hated the ending is so honest about it; don't you realize that many of you act just as the characters in the movie that deny what is happening.

If I were a young college student majoring in psychology, I would do a summary of all the comments on this page. It could serve as a non-scientific view on how citizens in the U.S. regard their surroundings.

Just wait til Hancock hits the screens - and see how you'll like that one....

I like Stephen King books, I like horror movies and monster movies, but...

THIS WAS THE WORST MOVIE I'VE EVER (half) WATCHED!

From the first scenes of the movie, I could tell the acting was horrible, and the lack of soundtrack made it seem even lower budget and lifeless. I watched the first 20 minutes, until the tentacles attacked the guys in the back room of the grocery store, and it was then that I knew that this movie was on par with those really bad made-for-SciFi-channel movies. If 20 minutes go by, and you're not emotionally invested in the characters, you're not going to be. I fast-forwarded through the horrible acting to get to the action scenes, which were so cheesy, lame, poorly animated and integrated that I didn't even enjoy them on a basic masculine, action-loving level. Fast-forwarded to the end, nobody cares, turned it off. Thank God I Netflixed it instead of being forced to sit through 2 hours of crap in the theater. This wasn't even a theater-quality movie! It had made-for-tv-crap written all over it. This movie was worse than Silent Hill (which was also really bad). But hey, if you loved Silent Hill, maybe you'll love this.

this is the worse movie I've ever seen, bad acting bad CG and all the stuff david said. I want my fuckin money back!.