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The Mist - an utterly wretched movie

By Scott Tibbs, October 4, 2011

I watched The Mist last week. The premise looked interesting and held a lot of promise, but the movie was just utterly wretched. This could have been much better than it turned out to be.

Mrs. Carmody (the caricature "christian" heel character) was laughable in her one-dimensional insanity. She is a hate-filled bitter old hag who sees herself as superior to everyone else and thinks she is God's messenger on earth. It would have been easy to include a sane, legitimate Christian character for balance, and that would have made this movie far more watchable. Instead, having Mrs. Carmody as the only representative of "christianity" causes The Mist to come across as anti-Christian propaganda

Any Christian with any knowledge of Scripture could have completely neutered Mrs. Carmody's perversion of Christian doctrine. Once she gets the people trapped in the store to join her "instant cult in a box" (more on that later) she has her followers sacrifice a soldier to the monsters. Then she demands that a woman she dislikes and a nine year old child be sacrificed to "appease" the monsters.

Human sacrifice? Really? Besides the fact that Jesus Christ is the one-time sacrifice for sin, Jeremiah 32:35 alone is more than enough utterly annihilate her "argument" that "god" is calling for blood to appease the monsters waiting outside the store. That's in the Old Testament, by the way.

Are we really to believe that this woman, who is established as the town crazy, would so easily turn the majority of the people trapped in the store to her wicked prophecies? Are we to really believe that over the course of a couple days they would be ready to engage in human sacrifice, especially when a child is the victim? The "explanation" for this - that people will do anything when scared - was weak at best. They might as well have broken the fourth wall and admitted they needed crazy townspeople for the next scene.

The Mist could have ended on a high note, but the final scene was rushed and unnecessarily cruel to the protagonist. Having run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, with monsters nearby, our main protagonist (David Drayton) executes the three adults and his own son to prevent them from being killed painfully by the monsters.

Immediately thereafter, the army comes through, having rescued the people in the store and turned back the invading monsters. So Drayton is left screaming because he has just murdered his son for no reason. The ending was by far the worst part of this movie - even worse than the Christian-bashing and the unrealistic "instant cult in a box."

The origin of the monsters could have - and should have - been more deeply examined. Basically, the military had broken the barrier between dimensions, and the monsters had spilled through. It was a very interesting concept, and only mentioning it in passing leaves too many loose ends.

The Mist could have been so much better. The heavy handed anti-Christian propaganda, the unrealistic brainwashing of most of the crowd, and the heartless and depressing ending ruined it.

Final Grade: F