O Nevoeiro

The Mist was an excellent story and great movie. The series however was extremely disappointing. The first episode was rough, did not really build up the suspense and the suspense never really gets built up. Each subsequent episode begins to degrade from there. There are some very good actors, but some of the roles are poorly cast. I did enjoy seeing Alsya Sutherland in something outside of Vikings and she does a good job with what she has to work with in the role. There are times when the story threatens to become good, but in general the pace is slow and the drama thick. It is like a soap opera moved into Stephen King land. On a plus side, while the series goes out of it's way at the expense of the plot and story to embed modern Hollywood clichés that you see in pretty much each and every movie and TV series today, at least some of these clichés are turned into bad guys. One of the few redeeming qualities, but it did have me skipping parts here and there.

The special effects are very low budget. The action is lame even for a TV series and poorly directed. It is also difficult to find anybody to like much less identify with. At times you find yourself rooting for the Mist which is not the same Mist that is portrayed in the movie. Flawed characters are one thing, but the few people you can actually like do not last long. Apparently the moral of the story is that humans do not deserve to live as each and every one of us is flawed beyond redemption. Many of the depictions are pointless and distractions and opportunities to insert action and suspense are the casualties of the poor plot development which moves like Molasses in an ice storm. Most of the "surprises" are rather predictable. One of the elements that makes King's work so interesting is you never really know. Good guys can lose or win in a King story. People do unpredictable things in King stories but their actions at least make sense in the framework of their perspective. In this series people just do things apparently without reason or cause. At points the interactions just defy all logic and you have no perspective to put them in as the characters are doing things nobody would ever do given that person's perspective. People can be cruel, can be weak, but there's always some sort of logical framework they are operating under. Even if the reasoning is flawed it at least makes sense in a way to that person and creates a trajectory. A path they will follow. In the Mist these people bounce around like a pinball machine committing actions that contradict everything they do, say and believe.

In the end you are left with a bowl of tired clichés and a plot that has no drive, no energy or even meaning. The social commentary is used like a club and offensive at best. The writer or director must truly loath themselves and by proxy all of humanity, but not even in an interesting way. The holes in the plot and the slow speed leave you with an incomprehensible soup of poorly copied movie moments changed just enough that they are not really recognizable, but also neither original or interesting. I gave this a 5 because it does have a moment here and there that is interesting, and some of the acting is quite good.

This suffers from the same problem as a lot of Stephen King adaptations, in that it's very low budget. It's an expected result of his novels being available for use in movies and television series basically for free, since the same people who can't afford special effects or a good filming crew are also going to be attracted to the low cost of basing their work on his novels.

So yes, the effects, shooting, and editing are generally of poor quality. If you go into it expecting it to look like something that enthusiastic drama club kids from high school would put together, you won't be disappointed. The casting and acting is surprisingly good. The dialogue isn't bad.

The script deviates a lot from the book. In some ways that's a good thing, because the book was written 37 years ago, and elements from it would not have made sense in a modern series. It's also an improvement that there's more than one band of survivors in a single location. Changing the lead character's young son into a teenage daughter is also an improvement - while having the little kid to protect gives the protagonist an automatic moral high ground, he would have been annoying in a movie.

Some are criticizing the social themes, but those themes are very much in keeping with Stephen King's general work. He is all about small town dysfunction, hypocrisy, and even insanity. So I don't think the various issues regarding sexuality and bullying are even slightly out of place, even if they obviously weren't a focus of the novel.

But there are a few changes that don't work as well. Why does this small town have a huge indoor mall? How can the mist both be mysteriously related to a nearby army base, but also have happened 150 years ago? And they may have made a mistake in transforming the mist from a straight-forward mist with lots of monsters, into something that has a bit of a life of its own and seems to hold personal delusions which other people can see and hear. The Arrowhead guys are also completely lacking any subtlety, and appear to be extremely stupid. Some of their actions are undoubtedly intended to make the situation seem more serious, but since their characters have no substance, they come of as daft and impulsive instead.

But ultimately I'm going to keep watching it, and I hope there's a second season. It would be interesting to see where or when (or if) the mist ends, what's up at Arrowhead, who the amnesiac really is, and if everyone gets what they deserve.

In The Mist we get to know a small American town in which everyone seems to want to come across as incompetent, over-reactive, small-minded, humorless but above all very unfriendly. Everyone seems to hate each other, and the few people who form the exception, the people who do not constantly act like an idiot, and thus with whom I could best identify, are also the first to die (already in episode 1). This phenomenon is increasingly seen in drama series. At the The Walking Dead I decided to discontinue watching after three seasons (I was ultimately in favor of the zombies, which is not the maker's intention I assume). What makes The Mist even easier to dismiss are the worthless special effects and terrible acting. If you make a television show that is located in a thick layer of mist, you want to make sure that the fog looks like a fog. I suspect the makers were trapped inside their own cloud of incompetence.

Of course this is going to be compared to the literature followed by the remake film, which leaves us with high expectations. The first episode started out brilliant and left me wanting more, it was around episode 4-5 that I started to find things dragging on with very little action. There were really fun bits of the movie that didn't make it to season 1, maybe season 2? Though I'm confident we won't see that gracing our screens anytime soon. As a standalone series it's not without it's own ideas, however due to the dragging mid season I can't recommend this, I'm giving it a 6/10 for the Mist Film lovers, however 3-4/10 for normal viewage.

Very disappointed to watch 10 hours of The Mist to finish on a cliffhanger which I've read hasn't been putto a second series. A complete waste of time. Why can't something be announced that says this series won't continue. It should have not been left at that ending.