Film - The Mist

Having directed The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, Frank Darabont returns with his third Stephen King film adaptation, The Mist. Known for his long-winded dramas, Darabont wields the same patient storytelling this time in a sci-fi/horror film. But a horror film with massive flying bugs and body slicing tentacles is not an effective place for what becomes a series of lengthy and dramatic character examinations about the evils of Christian fundamentalism.

The film follows David Drayton (Nathan Gamble), a movie-poster painter in a small coastal town in Maine who takes his son to the grocery store to buy supplies the morning after a severe storm. Soon enough, a small mist emerging from a nearby lake begins to spread over the town, preventing anyone from seeing outside the store's glass windows. That's when the creatures in the mist begin ripping people to shreds (in gory detail) and hostility ensues among the townspeople trapped in the store.

What could have been a great horror film instead becomes an awkward commentary about corrupt human nature, comprised of obscure snippets covering even the morality of abortion and stem cells. Much of the scenes in the grocery store revolve around a religious zealot (Marcia Gay Harden) who in increasingly wild rants claims the mist and its creatures are God's revenge against sinners.

Darabont was at his best in Shawshank and The Green Mile when his characters didn't preach the story's message in an overt manner that compromised the natural progression of the film. Unfortunately, his two lesser and more recent films, The Majestic and now The Mist do just that.

In some ways, the film brings to mind M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, the 2002 film in which a family also hides from invading aliens but, through faith, saves itself and brings a father back to the priesthood. The Mist tells a similar story about people hiding from invaders of another world-but with an opposite message. In this case, faith manipulates the fears of people in danger and unleashes the darkest side of human nature. But where Signs succeeds in intertwining message with story, The Mist seems utterly lost in its effort to be both an entertaining horror film and a didactic drama.

-Greg Bobrinskoy