When a nameless peripheral character has her jaw torn from her face, the visual is qualitatively gross, but the cheap effects on display are campy, not horrifying. The Mist’s grotesqueries fail to shock beyond their graphic distaste, mostly because they aren’t lifelike enough to be truly disturbing. The officers’ actions here are unrealistic and inexplicable, beyond serving to parallel current events: Bryan is black, and when the police subdue and cuff him, the resulting image clumsily evokes #BlackLivesMatter. When Bryan, the soldier from the forest, arrives at the police station and hysterically warns officers of the incoming mist, he’s cuffed and thrown into a cell. A police officer is killed when he lingers in the mist to take a selfie, in a scene that would likely elicit snarky laughter in a theater. They venture outdoors when they should plainly stay put, and baselessly ignore warnings any sound person would heed. The Mist’s horror elements are as trite as its human drama, with characters dying by the familiar dictates of the show’s chosen genre. That wickedness, though, is a mission statement in the series. The novella slowly eroded the façade of civility between its characters, and treated the wickedness of humanity as something to reveal. The fact of Alex’s assault adds little gravity to a story already concerned with the darkest elements of human nature, but The Mist unfolds as though we’ll be surprised to learn that humans are capable of cruelty. Her mother, Eve (Alyssa Sutherland), forbade her from going to the party, but her father, Kevin (Morgan Spector), secretly allowed her to sneak out. The Copeland family is traumatized when the teenage Alex (Gus Birney) is sexually assaulted at a party. The Mist broadens the scope of the novella by adding a tragedy that precedes the arrival of the mist. It’s the first of many clichés in a story packed with one-dimensional characters that behave predictably and speak in platitudes. The pilot episode’s first shot is cribbed from shows like The Walking Dead and Lost, and films like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Even when it diverts from the original narrative (and it does so significantly), the results are rarely fresh. The series does little to innovate in its presentation though, a fact exacerbated by uninspired storytelling and stock filmmaking. Unoriginality is, in one regard, an unavoidable symptom of adaptation. Of course, that feeling is in part a result of King’s story having already been adapted by Frank Darabont in 2007. This scene doesn’t appear in the novella but nonetheless feels derivative, and the feeling of watching it unfold is informed not by dread, but rather a disappointing sense of recognition. As the man dramatically attempts to resist panicking, those familiar with the source material are likely to experience the triggering of an internal alarm, one unrelated to series creator Christian Torpe’s intentions. A dense fog, hiding mysterious and deadly creatures, envelops the bucolic Maine setting. Spike TV’s adaptation of Steven King’s 1980 novella The Mist opens with an overhead shot of a soldier (Okezie Morro) on a forest floor, jarred from sleep by the barking of a nearby dog.
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