photo © Emilie Villemagne for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike
I just finished watching Stephen King's "The Mist". If you don't want a spoiler, stop reading now. And if you don't like implied foul language, stop reading now.
Fine, I warned you. Let me save you a waste of time
It's well done. They stuck close to the story. Marcia Gay Harding played an excellent nut job. The creepiness came not from the rubbery fake monsters but from watching the people interact, lose it before your eyes. I was actually rather enjoying the thing.
Until the last five G@) D@^^#) minutes of the movie.
I've been reading reviews, and they all say the story itself doesn't end. But it does end. A small group of them get out, try to drive away, and end up almost out of gas at a Howard Johnson's. They're inside for the night, the three or four of them, and the dad/narrator is playing with a radio when he thinks he hears a broadcast from Hartford. The last line is something like "There are two words that start with that h sound. One is Hartford. The other is hope."
Now in the movie I expected some kind of rescue, the military coming in to save the day, some kind of big Hollywood ending. That would be OK, it was a movie, I can live with that. I could also have lived with the non-ending in the book, give them a shot at hope, but never tell us if they got there.
I sure as H#!! did not expect the dad to be rescued two minutes after shooting his son and the other three survivors.
WHAT THE F^@&!!!!
So the people in the store, who listened to the nut job, who killed the private as a sacrifice to their Old Testament deity of blood and gore, who were not willing to go to the pharmacy to get drugs to ease the burned guys passing, who were sitting on their a$$#$, waiting to get saved...were rescued and lived happily ever after.
While the dad, who wanted to do the best for his son, who wanted to to his best for the others, who was trying his level damnedest to make it work...is punished in the worst possible way. Now he has to live with killing his own son seconds from rescue.
Well f^@& me sideways. Isn't that just what we want to teach people these days. Do nothing to help yourself, ever. No, turn it all over to the big deity in the sky, squat there, and let the government come to save you. Because if you try to use your god-given brains and your human courage to try to help yourself you're going to end up in the living version of hell. Proles win, the confident, courageous Upper Middle Class types lose. Because confidence and courage, the willingness to take responsibility and control of your own life, is what classes you, not how much money or learning or social standing you have. And now that I think about it, that's exactly who remains in the store.
Thank you f^@&ing Hollywood.
/rant
