I knew there was going to be some cheating in this series.
I had hoped to have each of the six movies fit perfectly into the formula of a movie I disliked from a director whose other work I not only liked, but whose other work I had seen the entirety of.
I got through the first two installments of the series following that concept pretty closely. But knowing that there were a lot of square pegs fit into round holes in the movies I identified and added to my Letterboxd list, which I created specifically to keep track of these movies, I knew I'd have to deviate from it somewhat. And that first instance is Frank Darabont.
For one, I have not seen every movie Frank Darabont has directed. There's only one I've missed, but when you've only directed four feature films, that's a pretty significant percentage. The Majestic (2001) escaped me -- which is unusual given how much I also like Jim Carrey -- but I wasn't going to go throw it on my watch schedule and hope I liked it, just so I could do a Frank Darabont movie this month.
Actually, I'd been even further from Darabont completism up until recently, as I only just saw The Green Mile in 2018, a full 19 years after it was released. I did like it quite a bit, though, which is a bit surprising, because that isn't necessarily the sort of movie that ages well.
So the second way I'm cheating is that in using a preponderance of evidence to determine that Darabont is a director I really like, making the one movie of his I didn't like an outlier, I am throwing in a TV show. Darabont, you may remember, was the creator of The Walking Dead, which actually seems like a natural offshoot of this one movie I don't like that I haven't mentioned yet. I used to love The Walking Dead and still think of some of the shocking deaths in it today, even though it's been a couple years since I finally broke down and paid to rent whatever season I had gotten up to when I lost access to it. (It went to one of the streamers I don't have, I think, and I may still have as many as three seasons to catch up on, to say nothing of the multiple spinoff series.)
With the cheats thrown in, I do think The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead are enough to tell me I think Frank Darabont is capable of great things, and usually delivers them. (Shawshank, which has gone unmentioned until now, is currently #27 on my Flickchart, and I don't think my affection for it requires any further elaboration.)
But my goodness did I hate The Mist.
If you asked me to name a movie that made me spitting mad when I saw it, The Mist is one of the first I'd think of. I wrote a pretty epic takedown of it in the very first year of this blog, which you can read here if you want to. (The "Lord Vader" referenced in the opening line was another blogger whose stuff I read at the time, back when we all used to read each others' stuff, and when other bloggers actually, you know, existed.)
If you read that piece I just linked, you'll note that I focused the lion's share of my negative energies on the character played by Marcia Gay Harden, the religious nut job who doesn't show an ounce of kindness to anyone, even when they are overtly trying to be kind to her. I still have problems with this character -- would it have killed them to give her a little nuance? -- but I think I appreciated it more this time as the actress just deciding she was going to chew the scenery and going for it.
Oh, in order not to bury the lede, I will say clearly: I don't hate The Mist anymore.
Before I started to watch it on Saturday night, I did momentarily ask myself what the point was. One of the things about being a cinephile is that you think your opinion of a movie is correct. That makes you hesitant to rewatch a movie you didn't like, because you feel like you had a pretty good handle on it the first time and there's little chance your opinion is going to be changed.
Little does not mean none.
Although I came away from the first two movie in this series, Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast and James Cameron's True Lies, feeling very similarly to how I felt about them the first time, The Mist did improve significantly for me on this viewing. I must have had something in my craw that night I first watched it in 2009.
Before I get into the substance of my reappraisal, I wanted to mention that it was interesting to watch this movie in the context of already having watched The Walking Dead. No fewer than three speaking roles in this film were essayed by actors who would go on to appear in the first season of The Walking Dead, though I won't spoil how long they may have survived on that show. Melissa McBride had the biggest role on The Walking Dead -- Carol, who found herself at the center of many dramas -- but the smallest of the three roles here. The two bigger roles were Jeffrey DeMunn and Laurie Holden, who played Dale and Andrea, respectively, on the zombie show. (I'm going to list all of them in past tense because the series is over now, not because I'm tell you which ones died.) (Incidentally, both of those actors also appeared on The X-Files -- Holden memorably as Marita Covarrubius -- which is interesting, because it does not appear Darabont had any involvement with that.)
Okay I am getting sidetracked.
I think The Walking Dead helps with context for The Mist because it clearly shows Darabont's interest in investigating how people behave in a crisis. The Mist can be seen as a rough draft for The Walking Dead, in a very real way. Inside that Maine grocery store where the patrons are trapped, trying to hide from oversized bugs from another dimension, a Lord of the Flies type scenario plays out that is at the core of Darabont's interest of the breakdown of society under duress. In both cases, the external threat -- zombies, oversized bugs from another dimension -- is secondary to the internal threat, which is what humans will do to each other when there are no rules. In fact, the shocking deaths I continue to think about from The Walking Dead are not those perpetrated by zombies, but by humans against each other.
Led by Marcia Gay Harden's religious fanatic, I had thought these characters were a bit overdetermined, as Darabont wanted to hit us over the head with his ideas. I also thought there was a weird miscalculation by the director to make all the heroes be of a very liberal mindset, leaving all the country folk to be weak-minded bigots.
This stuff didn't bother me as much this time, and there's a contradiction to one of my assumptions about the film's political perspective that I will get to a bit later.
Anyway, in 2009 I thought the creature effects were bad and I did not feel very scared by them. I'm softer in this complaint this time as well. Of course, it's hard to put yourself back in the necessary 2007 mindset to remember how good or not good these effects looked 17 years ago. But even if they were not all totally on point or up to the current standards, what these bugs get up to is pretty scary. The spider web that burns your flesh. The tiny spiders that burst out of your body. The way your face bloats until you die when bitten by one of the oversized mosquitos. It was grim in the right ways.
I do have some fresh complaints as well though.
Although I don't remember focusing on this at the time, I do think it's funny how there are basically an unlimited number of people in the grocery store. Even after we've already lost as many as a dozen, due either to death or departure, there might be as many as a hundred others still in the store. Even with people stocking up after a storm that had just come through, I have a hard time believing this store was so chocked to the gills with customers.
And I do still have a problem with the ending.
At the time, I thought this ending was a sick joke. Maybe I still do. We see Frank Darabont consciously transition from a man who stared into the bleakness but found hope, as he did in his two Stephen King adaptations from the 1990s, to a man who stared at the bleakness and just saw bleakness. What the main character, played by Thomas Jane, does at the end of this movie is just so out of scope with the actual desperation of their situation, at least in terms of how much time they have been living with that level of desperation, which was not nearly enough to have resorted to what he does. And then to experience an immediate reversal is almost more of a punishment by the filmmaker than the comeuppance delivered to Harden's zealot.
And yet Jane's character, a man of action whose decisions thus far have demonstrated both courage and kindness, is the one traditionally drawn as a liberal. He's a visual artist who does not seem to originate from here, and has a career painting movie posters. (Interestingly, I saw in the credits that his posters were painted by Star Wars poster artist Drew Struzan. I may have forgotten this when I first saw it, but the painting themselves are clearly for already famous properties, such as The Thing and King's own The Dark Tower.)
So what are we to make of Darabont reserving his most twisted last gasp for this man who has been our hero the whole movie? Which is not, I should say, the way King's novella ends?
I don't know, but I do know that not knowing makes this movie more interesting to me.
Darabont has not directed a feature film since The Mist, which I find very interesting. His reasons probably don't have to do with a lack of opportunity, but rather, a different direction for his interests. The old me, who felt the way about The Mist that I used to feel, would have said this was his just desserts for making such a piece of crap.
But I don't know. The bleak Darabont who sees nothing but bleakness has a certain appeal to him, and I might like to see another movie from that guy.
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