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.