.Man was I happy to get this. The Mist isn’t just a solid adaptation of one of Stephen King’s best works. This film blends political and social commentary with 50s sci-fi horror movie monster archetypes to create something only the makers of Cloverfield have and The Host have gotten right in recent memory. This movie goes all the way with its dark vision of the future and probably suffered for it at the box office but I’m betting that as time goes on The Mist, will sadly, be seen as all too relevant a fable hinting at the dark place we increasingly think of as an inevitable future.
If the film falters at all it’s in the quickness in which characters turn to the completely wonked out faux fundamentalism of Mrs. Carmody. I agree that religious extremism is a dark and evil thing but this needed more fleshing out. I have the same problem with King’s novella. Small minded folks will take such a character as a reinforcement of their narrow minded views on religion but they miss the point. The scary thing, and I’m an Evangelical Christian, is that you don’t have to be nearly as whacked out or even religious as Mrs. Carmody to revert to the sort of character who is basically worthless if not outright dangerous in desperate situations. It’s when religion or any other ideology becomes an excuse for the person in question to indulge their hatred, bigotries, self interest, greed, lust, etc. that we need to worry. And Darabont does a great job showcasing that for the most part. Minor reservations aside this is indeed a landmark modern horror film and one that should be celebrated also as a labor of love.
The extras on the disc are well produced. Audio commentary by Darabont and others, several making of featurettes including a lengthy dissection of Scene 35 which should prove to anyone what a great filmmaker Darabont is, a nice tribute to poster artist Drew Struzan and the other sort of ephemera that one associates with DVD would have done the job nicely. But in addition to those you also get the option of watching The Mist as Darabont initially intended- that is to say in black and white- just like a fifties monster movie. The film hasn’t just been grey scaled here, it’s been painstakingly color corrected and when you see how it looks on that new HDTV via a simple upconvert DVD player you are going to go bananas. It is quite literally the only way you will ever want to watch this film again and I absolutely believe it should get a theatrical release in this format or at least tour the festival circuit. For one thing the documentary feel of the film is ramped up several notches. For another all the efforts of the movie to appeal to a fifties monster movie aestethic get a hefty boost. And lastly, in black and white, the whole film takes on a more surreal tone echoing the aspect that early cinema goers of the turn of the century associated with the unreal feeling they got from watching any cinema at all. The black and white version of the mist plays like a nightmare rooted in the very real anxieties and tensions we all associate with great apocalyptic art.