Sometimes it is hard to not think about something…
Two days ago I have written a little bit about the film adaptation of Stephen Kings short novella THE MIST. Yet I simply couldn’t get the ending of this movie out of my head.
The reason is not its drastic or shocking nature. In fact, as I witnessed the chain of events I was happy that finally someone found the guts to pull off something like that. Yet, during the time afterwards, I became more and more skeptical for the feeling that this ending didn’t fit completely.
The first one to blame for this problem would normally be Stephen King himself, but this time it isn’t his fault as the ending was created for this movie alone. And the difference couldn’t be more drastic.
(massive spoilers ahead)
The two endings of THE MIST
In the novella the protagonists escape from the super market store and make it to the car. They all (which means the survivors of the run) jump in and our hero drives with them away into an unsure future filled with this mist. Quite an open end King selected here.
In the movie they also escape from the super market store and make it to the car. Like in the novella the survivors of the run drive away. Yet this time we follow them for a while and when the gas runs out our main character makes a decision…and shoots everyone in the car including his young son. This almost breaks him completely but when the military makes its way to him he completely looses it.
As you can see the movie ending is drastic and really good. Yet, when I think about it I always get the feeling that the movie and this ending aren’t truly connected.
The missing connection
As I understand from a McKee point of view, a movie ending with its final turn of values from good to bad or vice versa is the core of the movie in terms of morale, feelings and so on. It defines the controlling idea/the premise. And therefore everything else in a movie. If you have a comedy and at the end everyone dies you have to rewrite everything else or get rid of this ending. Take THE MATRIX as an example of a strongly designed story that goes to the final turn without halt.
Now, in THE MIST our main protagonist kills everyone besides himself. This makes the ending bad on every level and forms an interesting controlling idea like “only cornered strong enough, man does everything” or something similar in that matter. Yet the whole time in the movie it is never hinted in the hero himself. He always acts in the right sense and almost never loses senses. You can also say that the situation in general gets worse, yet our hero doesn’t change. He doesn’t start to act desperate or truly feel desperate. And therefore his last act feel like out of the blue.
Moreover, there is the religious element of THE MIST. As you have read to this point and hence almost surely seen the film you know the religious talk all the time and how everyone starts to act like a religious fanatic. If we again take McKee into account with his assumptions that an ending defines a movie we can also assume that a movie defines its ending. If the movie is a comedy, the ending is funny. By applying this logic onto THE MIST it becomes clear that the ending should have been about the situation in the store. It would have even been possible to create a really bad ending out of this: our heroes get killed by the bunch. This ending would have been bad and shocking yet more fitting with the rest of the story. On the other hand, not as seemingly that shocking as the one we have.
In review I can truly understand why they chose this ending. It is shocking and shows that even normal people can act like they never would. It is a final big turn of events.
Yet, by changing the original ending it opened a can of worms resulting in a movie that doesn’t fit to its ending and an ending that doesn’t fit to its movie.
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I agree whole heartedly with your assessments here. I don’t really understand how it only took about 3 minutes for him to decide to shoot everyone. They didn’t even say anything, or even look around!
I mean really, they ran out of gas and he almost immediately pulls out the gun! Why don’t they just look around for a second, get out of the car and confirm murder suicide is only option?!
The people they left behind in the supermarket driving past in safety was a great touch.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I have several siblings and friends who have. To a man, each has said it is one of the most depressing movies they’ve ever seen. “What was the point?” they asked, and, “Did I just pay to watch a guy survive all this stuff only to watch him murder his own family?”
It was a twilight zone ending without a consistent lead-in.
Hm, are we a bit disappointed over the ending? In fact, it was the most sensible thing to do for him. He promised his son! Or did you really expect him to get out of the car and look around while there’s nothing to be seen and after what happened to all that were exposed to the mist more than a couple of seconds? Just to let his son see/hear him being killed?
It was a cruel end, but a fitting one. I was in need for a ‘happy end’, too, but it’s still more ‘rewarding’ than the original ‘ending’…
well, this movie left me feeling torn and it was so depressing. HOWEVER, the movie managed to shock me and it is rare that i am shocked. sometimes you grow tired of the expected happy ending.
Everybody, thank you very much for your comments.
You are absolutely right regarding the happy ending thing in horror movies. I, too, hate nothing more than a forced happy ending. So, I was and am absolutely not disappointed over the ending as Hm implies. In fact I really like this bad ending – which doesn’t fit the movie in my eyes, though.
And there is another thing I forgot to mention in the post: during the movie there were many situations in which the characters were in a bigger and more imminent danger than at the end. Of course, at the end they were in the middle of nothing surrounded unseen creatures. Yet the situation in the shop was very often far worse than that with the creatures hanging on the neck of everybody.
In terms of screenwriting, as far as I have learned, you have to put the characters into evolving bad situations, meaning, the situations have become worse over time. The pressure needs to build. But at the end of MIST, at least I got the feeling that there was no pressure at all.
If the director or the screenwriter would have taken this into account, the ending suddenly would have fit far more than now. Imagine the ending as it is now, only with a bunch of nasty creatures surrounding the car. Our heroes try everything to cast them off, but they fail. No gas, no water, no food. They wait in the car for days (not minutes as implied in the movie) and during these days, our main hero more and more comes to the conclusion that there is only one way…
This ending would have been four to five minutes longer, yet would have created a better flow of events in my eyes. Not a feeling of a forced event we have in the movie.
I love pessimism, but that ending straight felt like I’d wasted my time watching it. Its overzealous religious themes were too much to handle at times, even for an exaggerated world. I wanted a movie about monsters and people, not the ironic glorification of god’s wrath against atheists. Maybe the real reason I hated it was because up until the ending Thomas Jane was pulling off acting like I’d never think he was capable of. Its unbelievable enough that he kills everyone within minutes of running out of fuel, but then the degradation of his acting after that point made me so disconnected from the movie the ending barely phased me.
Hi there. I know this is a couple of years too late, but I just saw this movie on TV and I wanted to comment to SOMEBODY. The reason I hated the ending is that it just didn’t make sense.
I mean, when they’re driving they stop the car because they hear the footsteps and feel the vibrations of a dinosaur-sized monster, but nobody can hear TANKS and HELICOPTERS that are apparently only seconds to their six? How the hell does that make sense? Did the Mist magically cancel out sounds too? Because we heard plenty of monster sounds from the Mist during the movie, but when it’s convenient, the sounds that man-made machines make on a silent road in a dead car suddenly disappear.
So yeah, that’s why I hated the ending. It was stupid and manipulative. Did I mention stupid?
Don’t worry, a comment never can be too late.
Your point regarding the sounds is absolutely correct. It even get’s better when you start to reason that the military has to fight those monsters. Therefore it’s not only tanks and helicopters but tanks and helicopters and big fat explosions. The mist indeed is very, very convenient for the plot. The ending only gets more ridiculous thanks to that.
Greetings…
Very interesting, interesting posts as well…but for those of you that had been prayin’ they would do the original ending in the film (as I did), I would love to know what you think of this…
http://www.karcreat.com/MistNovellaCut.html
Thanks…
-K
Very well done cut to get as close to the real ending as possible.
Is there enough material in this movie to perhaps try to show what happens? You could cut it that way that the main character listens to the radio. In the static he hears the destination. At first he doesn’t react. But then the car starts to move and vanishes in the mist.
Actually, we created an entirely NEW ending, using some edits from the film, making new ones too…at the moment I am working with a very talenetd b;loke from the UK who does CGI professionally, and we are ADDING several new sequences to the finale as well, all based on scenes from the novella…
http://www.karcreat.com/MistNovellaCut2.html
Wow, not bad for a start. Can’t wait to see the final result.
I just watched the movie, and i started looking for answers that could possibly explain more about the story than the actual ending. The movie is good, it builds tension and suspense, but then at the end it doesnt clarify certain events.
For example:
Why/How did the mist disappear?
What happened to norton(black man who left store)?
What is the mist, what does it do? What is its purpose?
What happens to the people in the store?
Does the mist consume the entire planet?
Why doesnt that bug kill that religious lady?
There are other questions, but that goes beyond the scope of the movie/novel. I think a sequel should be made. Maybe different scenario/viewpoint(eg: the army/scientists)
Honestly, an ending similar to war of the worlds and evolution would have made a huge impact.