Darabont Talks About Ending THE MIST



Did you like the ending of The Mist?  Frank Darabont   Like it or hate it, you'll enjoy Blake Hennon's LA Times article, "‘The Mist’: Frank Darabont, Thomas Jane on ‘angry, bleak’ ending."  (herocomplex.latimes.com)

Hennon quoted Darabont,
“I was really getting something off my chest here,” Darabont said. “So if you hated the ending, I apologize for the two hours of your life I took. … This is an angry cry from the heart from a humanist who is really pretty pissed off about the fact that all the reasonable people seem to be marginalized, ground under the heel of the extremists.”
The good news is that I didn't lose two hours of my life.  The movie was great -- until characters  who had been making solid decisions began acting irrationally.

Darabont declares him the "reasonable" people. Was that ending reasonable?  No.  Because the situation wasn't really serious when David Drayton took things into his own hands. It had the potential of getting  bad -- but it wasn't that bad yet.

4 comments:

  1. Believe it or not, I think King says somewhere that Darabont actually filmed a positive ending, in fact I think the interview is somewhere on Lilja's Library's Mist files.

    I think King said something like "Frank was a real sport about it" meaning making a positive audience pleaser ending presumably, but that "things just weren't working out," whatever that means.

    Still, it would be interesting to see that positive ending footage, even if it isn't all that good.

    I still think the ending kind of brings the film down a bit, that and an over reliance on religious spouting Mrs. Carmody (in the short story her character is actually more intelligent and cunning than the film, more a conniving opportunist than a religious fanatic).

    Chris

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  2. It seems the ending of a movie determins if I want to watch it again. I enjoyed the mist a first time, but cannot stomach wathcing a child killed at the hands of his father again.

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    1. Well, I do admit that the nature of an ending can determine the nature of how you view the rest of the film

      Personally I think the kind of ending an author rites depends a lot on his First Principles, even if they're only his principles of the moment, as Darabont seems to acknowledge.

      ChrisC

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  3. it annoys me that the ending is not natural to the story -- Darabont just admits he was mad and wanted to mess with viewers.

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