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Finally...The Mist

The only real highlight of the movie, was near the end, when they roamed the ravaged landscape, while orchestral music was playing in the background. Those were 3-4 minutes of wonderful camerawork, imagery, and sound. The school bus with dead children, the burning forests, the destroyed buildings, the colossal creature walking peacefully (SotC, anyone ?) minding its own business in the midst of an inferno, the desperation in the characters eyes, those were a quarter dozen of minutes of quality cinema.
 
SPOILERS (srsly)
In spite of the haunting quality of the final sequence that MDS speaks of, the ending still sucked ass. While I concede that there's no way they could have left the totally ambiguous ending intact from the novella (anyone who doubts me should look up the John Sayles film Limbo on any film board and skim the commentaries), they opted for such a ham-fisted attempt at ironic 'twist' I almost broke my teeth cringing. Adding insult to injury was the decision to have Bad Mom who leaves the store at the beginning of the crisis SURVIVE what was no doubt a looooong stroll through the mist, after it had been painstakingly established that nobody can make it more than a hundred yards or stay out for more than five minutes before being set upon. Yet there she is, safe & sound with her kids in the company of soldiers many miles away, like a final existential "fuck you" to the hero's final tragedy. It not only trashes any suspension of disbelief the viewer's maintained up to that point, it completely undermines the poignancy of her pleading scene in the supermarket.

According to the commentary King approved of Darabont's ending, which just goes to show that he's got no interest in maintaining any semblance of integrity when it comes to his past work (or do I need to bring up the turdburger he ground out as an ending to The Dark Tower?)
 
Not the overall story, but certainly the last book and especially the epilogue or coda or whatever the fuck it was. What a poor-man's-Twilight-Zone-time-loop copout lump of dogshit.

I remember the first book fondly, and very much liked the fourth, Wizard & Glass. Even the fifth was okay. The sixth was little more than an epilogue to the previous book as well as a prologue to the last, and book seven was just all over the place. King's great at the short story and good at the novel --even lengthy ones. But he just doesn't have what it takes for the multi-volume epic.
 
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