And maybe I just saved you some time reading a review of sorts that won't matter now.
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The Mist, starring Morgan Spector, Alyssa Sutherland, Gus Birney, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Russell Posner, Okezi Morro and Frances Conroy, starts out with a man waking up in the woods and not knowing who he is, but his dog stands by his side. Almost immediately, the dog senses something and runs off into the encroaching fog barking its head off. But we then hear it cry out and die. The man runs into town and tries to warn people, to no avail. He only gets thrown in jail for his troubles.
We are then QUICKLY introduced to a slew of characters, from
-The teacher getting fired for how she taught a sex education class;
-The meta student, who loves personalities, not genders;
-The plucky daughter who wants her independence from her over-controlling mom, then gets raped at a party;
-The cops son, the jock, getting accused of the rape;
-An out-of-the-blue hostage scene where she ends up killing her captor with a pitch fork;
-An unknown woman trying to get into a house that her friend left behind when she died;
-A few moralistic majority folks, you know the kind, they're always right, you're not, and a few more.
It was totally crazy how much crap they threw at viewers in the first half of the pilot episode, leaving very little to grow from through the season.
And then the fog, sorry, mist roles in. It kills the power, cell phones and leaves our people to their base instincts. The first victim gets eaten alive by bugs or scarabs or whatever they were. The next victim dies by the confusion of another, the third victim, a real bi..., gets it.
There are different locations that people find themselves trapped in, so we have multiple locations to generate different premises of trapped people. So here we go!
All in the first episode.
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You know, they had a great opportunity to use a few episodes to really build up the character tension and have the fog, sorry, mist, slowly moving towards the town. They could have had a ton of anticipation from the characters about the fog. They could have had incidental events create more tension among the characters. But instead, they threw out two big warning flags about a series that the production crew has no faith in.
What are my warning signs?
Generally speaking, have you noticed that Hollywood does not hurt animals? But in this show, the very first thing they do is kill a dog and show us graphically that it was stripped down to nothing.
Generally speaking, I almost quit watching at that point. They could have just shown a terrified dog, not a eviscerated one. That was my first WTF and I almost quit the show there. There was no need for that moment in that way.
My other BIG warning sign that has yet to fail me:
When a show starts out, a good show can start telling a story and let the viewer slowly be introduced to characters as the story unfolds. OR they introduce you to a ton of characters right up front in the first episode in the hopes that you'll find a character you can identify with and want to watch. Usually crappy shows tend to do that because they don't have a ton of confidence in their product and want to toss out as much bait as possible to try and catch someone's attention.
But I pushed on... suffering for you, so you can be warned! LOL.
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After the fog, sorry, I keep calling it fog. After the mist attacks, we get to watch our mist refugees hiding in their different locations and this filler felt so boring. The mall was full of stiff acting. The church had some lively characters, but the cop could not use his words to explain his motivations.
The show is about a freaky event populated with your standard small town stereotype of characters with a bunch of angst against each other.
In this vision, rather than hungry monsters lurking about in the mist, eating people, there seems to be things that materialize from the mist, out of nowhere, depending on the character.
Of course there's the prerequisite sex during a disaster, from multiple sources.
And Eve... what a messed up head-case of a mother. Sheesh.
No, I did not call this show crappy. I just made a few correlated observations so far. Add that to the IMDb score... and well, should I go on? Or just let bygones be bygones and move on to my next task at hand?
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PS: OH, by the way, the 2007 film is awesome. (on Amazon) It's your standard King work, pitching a group of people into a crappy situation, then watching the different sects or groups of people facing off against each other while trying to face a common issue. It brought together moments of satire, horror, and political commentary with is usual ease by keeping things as simple as possible and driving the story via character-based developments.
And the ending of this film is a major f*ing jaw dropper! We need a prequel or sequel to learn more about what was coming out of the mist (IN THE MOVIE). Frank Darabont did a bang up job on the first film... he needs to step up for another one. (As if anyone is going to listen to me!)
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