spoiler: cloverfield & The Mist

[Frame]

Just watched "The mist" & "cloverfield"...

Why on earth don´t i read reviews before renting movies at block-buster.. 55 bucks(danish currency) out the window..

First i watched cloverfield, interesting approach... blair witch type hand held view from a hand held camera.. i´m very envies of that cameras battery life time though....

The ending: so we follow them through all the shit only to watch one of them get to be a snack... and the final two to be either nuked or carpet bombed, hard to tell since then the movie ends as the camera gets smashed. and then we get end titles..

No information to whether or not that the beast dies.. which is kind a unbelievable since it already has survived most of what the US military could throw at it.. anti tank missiles, tank rounds,artillery rounds, huge bombs from airplanes, tons of bullets... all while it looks very fleshy, and seems to be hurt by the hits.. it still survives every hit, and all rounds from tanks and missiles explodes on its skin, on impact... still its fleshy skin and what seems to be delicate gills do not take damage... E=Mc2 seems to be out of effect...

idea good, execution and continuity, bad, logical approach.. hey it´s a movie, we don´t need to obey physics, tilted sky scraper for example that leans onto another is quite unbelievable.

And then all the little critters the thing drops.. star ship trooper baby insects that apparently have infectious bites, that makes your eyes bleed, and your stomach explode in good old Alien fashion.. in less than what seems to be 2 hours.. They sound like something someone in a movie company wanted added to give the movie some “alien” moments... these can however be killed with a simple Iron Rod.. I let that stand for a moment..

bottomline, bad movie...

The Mist..

Mental note, never rent based on Stephen King book movies again..

Seems every time dear old Stephen has something to write about human nature, is that we in stressed situations degenerate to middle-age beliefs. And nobody in his story got the balls to take that religious broad mouth and stuff it with gaff tape. Instead they allow her to spread fear and soon we got the 8 believers vs the Jim Morrison group.. actually most of the story is about that.. and is quite boring.... yawn... and it takes ages before any of the group realizes that bugs are indeed attracted by lights... woohoo needs a rocket science degree to figure that one out. And our hero is asleep most of the time.. so that the religious broad can spread fear, and the rest of his group, cannot do anything while our hero is a sleep...

Regarding the monsters..

seems that in that dimension, there is nothing but predators, apart from bugs, that have a vicious sting to defend themselves with, big wasps that look like mosquitoes. They seem not to be able to use their sting however against anything but humans, their natural predator, some flying dinosaur, they just let themselves get eaten by them, without stinging... ehmm yes offcourse... like natural selection would let them survive

And then the monster spiders, acid web spiders more likely... they shoot acid web, that cuts through too arteries and thus bleeding their victims... apart from a select few that is left alive as it suits the movie plot...

The huge four legged tentacle beast.. yes everybody can´t see it because of the mist, I will get back to that later in the ending..

from inside the super market, you can see out through the mist perhaps 3 meters.. however as soon as you enter the mist, that magically becomes about 20-30 meters... now our sane group of people with out hero, escapes the Jim Morrison group, and heads for the end of the mist in a car.. naturally they run out of gas. Why did they not attempt to get some gas, from all the cars they just passed. That military jeep could have had some. Or try to tank some at the nearest tank station.. before heading out into the mist...

just after seeing a huge four legged tentacle beast that crosses their route...
visibility is now at about 100-200 meters.. hey the mist is clearing.. but no one notices that..they run out of gas...

They decide to commit collective suicide rather than stepping out into the now clearing mist and become monster food... but of course they only have 4 bullets, and are 5 people, 4 adults, and 1 kid.

it takes like 5 mins from they run out of gas, until they commit suicide.. only our hero is left alive.. and he steps out into the now clearing mist... and yells take me, to the monsters... we hear a sound, and hey here comes the military. 30+ Tanks, and Trucks, and Troops, and all the noise that we could´nt hear despite them only being 10 min away.. lights off despite the fact they drive into a mist, and somehow they make the mist retreat or evaporate... while burning nests of monster wasps..

of course our hero goes insane, cause he just killed his son, and 3 other adults, this is just another Stephen got tired of writing, and found a quick ending... but released it anyway, because he is Stephen King...

There is no point to the story, its just the same old usual, we are people therefore when threatened with getting killed as a group we become degenerate scared humans, and does not posses the fight or flight response, that is instinctively in us all.

Somebody ought to take old Stephen into real life, to teach him a tad more on human nature. Could be though he thinks “rednecks” degenerate faster, because they are country folks, and city people are arrogant therefore do not have the self preservation instinct.

In Stephens mind, all of New York should have committed collective suicide after or during 9/11, because they got scared from something they did not understand...

Anyway from now on, I avoid based on Stephen King book movies.

[DaddyHoggy]

I never wanted to watch either movie - I read the reviews - but your reviews have confirmed it!

The last Stephen King book I enjoyed was, I think, "Insomnia" - I haven't read anything new, new for years now - he just doesn't ring my bell anymore.

[polomint]

That 'Cell' book that King wrote was pretty good though..

It'd be nice if Kings' books would translate to the silver screen a bit better...

[Robbeasy]

Only a few Stephen King books translated to film well (IMHO)...

Shawshank Redemption - film follows the book plot pretty much faithfully, and is a completely wondrous film..

The Green Mile - again, follows the book plot closely. Great acting.

Delores Claiborne - just had the best story..

Stand By Me - book was called The Body. Great coming of age film.

Misery - didnt completely work for me, but great acting raised it up there.

Cell is in production/ waiting for release, be interesting to see what 'Zombie' film is churned out...

The Mist I want to see soon, as I love that short story...

There are plenty of duffers as well though...

Dead Zone
Carrie - i know a lot of people like it, but its just tooo hokey for me.
Dreamcatcher
Christine
Cujo
Anything to do with Children and Corn...;o)

etc etc - mostly the older films are worse, but Dreamcatcher manages to buck that trend.

And The Shining I've left out deliberately - its a great film, but is only loosely based on the actual book. Kubrick very much gave it his own Interpretation

Sorry to bang on, but I'm a big SK fan, read everything he's done, and still trying to get round to watching everything he's done as well...

[LittleBear]

Havent seen the film, but read the orginal short story by King. Have to say I do think he's very underated as a writer. His stuff is actually good! (although you'd never know that from the film versions!). Some things that are good to read don't make a good film.

I read The Mist years ago. As a short story it was great. In the story at least, one of the charcaters does in the end shoot the religious nut dead
. They don't try suicide, some of the group escape (and don't run out of petrol!). They drive away from the town and keep driving from Petrol Station to Station, but find no end to the mist. The ending is left open-ended. In the short story, the charcters are just a bunch of random people who happened to be in the grocery store when the mist falls (what caused it is unexplained). The weird creatures emerge from the mist and start killing. The characters are trapped in the store and its really a story about how the different characters deal with this wierd situation. Of course, they should have stopped the religious nut at the start. But would peole really do that in Real Life? We all like to think we have the moral fiber to stand up to prejudices, but how many times do people actually take a stand? (Rember Milgram's experiement!) Often these things are ignored. And these are just a bunch of ordinary guys. One has a gun (cos its the US and her husband gave it to her for protection - being married to an American, I'd say its realistic that of 20 Americans in a store one will have a gun in their purse for "defence"!), but it takes a lot before the characters relise how dangerous she is and finally one shoots the religious nut when she's wipping up her follows into making a human sacrifice as the only "logical" way to get rid of the problem of the mist. Ok, you could argue that its a sci-fi / fantasy classic plot of the monsters are in the store rather than outside, but its done well!

As a short story it works well, but I can see how it would make a lousy film. If you haven't read Kings shorts stories though, I'd really reckomend them! Don't be put off by the films