Cynical Cinema

John Cusack can do clever dialogue in his sleep.  And at the beginning of 1408, he does.  He and Samuel L. Jackson engage in a very intelligent exchange, through which they both appear to be phoning it in.  You see, Cusack is a ghost-story-debunker, and Jackson is a hotel manager whose hotel has a demon room.  Room 1408.  Jackson does not want Cusack to stay in that room, but Cusack insists, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.  Sam Jackson and John Cusack will never suck, they are both too good for that, but their performances here are average at best.  Jackson is good, however, when he begins to warn Cusack away from the room.  His delivery, while matter-of-fact, is decidedly unsettling, and he gets better as the scene goes on. 

And the movie gets better as it goes on.  It’s based on a short story by Stephen King, which is nice and succinct and interesting.  But the movie expands on that short story in a big way.  And good thing too, because the story, while quick, to the point, and fun, would have made a fairly lousy movie, and the resolution would have been pretty trite and boring on screen.  For those of you who have read the story, rest assured.  It does NOT end the same way.  And it doesn’t develop the same way either.  The only thing the book and the movie have in common is the beginning.  Cusack is a writer, who has given up what looked to be a very promising career as a brilliant writer to churn out a bunch of low-rent ghost-story books about haunted castles and hotels and such.  And in the course of his research, he happens upon the Dolphin hotel, where 56 people have died in room 1408 since the hotel opened.

What happens next is not so much a ghost story as it is a bizarre, horrific acid trip for Cusack.  Describing what goes on would be pointless, since much of it is meaningless, a lot of it is boring, and very little is actually scary.  But there are some freaky moments, and frightening ones, that involve Cusack himself.  A tense moment on the ledge outside the hotel, and another tense claustrophobic scene in the air ducts above room 1408.  In the end, the creepy vibe and the actual scares come from Cusack himself more so than from his surroundings and the happenings in the room.  And as such, the movie is decent because Cusack himself is decent.  At times he just doesn’t seem cut out for the terror-acting, and at other times his bemusement turns to alarm which turns into fear in a very believeable progression.  As Cusack goes, so goes 1408.  He’s decent, the movie is decent.

A movie based on a Stephen King novel is not always an indication that good things will happen. Most of us remember most of the movies based on his books as complete train wrecks. Dreamcatcher, Needful Things, Maximum Overdrive, Cujo…all awful films. There have been only two really successful movies based on King’s works - The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. (Although I didn’t like the Green Mile much, at least it wasn’t Graveyard Shift.) Both of those films were directed by Frank Darabont, who seems to do his best work when he collaborates with Stephen King. (He was also the screenwriter for The Fly 2 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Which were as bad as Needful Things.)

The Mist is their third film together, and it does rise a little bit above the other King movies, but does not approach the quality of say, Shawshank. The biggest problem with the movie seems to be, remarkably, a disconnect between the writer and the director. Stephen King is successful because he understands that the scariest thing in the world is other people, far more so than any monsters or spirits or bugs that might hide in the mist. But Darabont is so intent on showing the dark side of human nature and the evil that resides within men that he is too anxious to show it. The premise of the story is that a mist descends over a small town, and there are horrible creatures that hide within that mist and kill people when they venture too far into that mist. A bunch of people are trapped inside the local grocery-hardware store, and they begin to self-destruct. Apparently, as far as this film is concerned, these people are so ready to turn on each other that they do so within one minute of the mist descending. They are instantly transformed into idiots, maniacs and evil-doers, in the time it would take normal people to finally understand there was anything wrong.

And am I the only one who notices that Aaron Eckhardt and Thomas Jane are the same person? Jane is the star of The Mist, a father who is protecting his young son at all costs against the creatures outside, and more importantly, the religious fanatic nutjobs inside. He is, for all intents and purposes, Aaron Eckhardt with less smiling. They are the same person, and I will not believe otherwise until I see them in the same movie together. In the same scene. I like Jane, and in this film, he is pretty good. So is Toby Jones, as a supermarket employee who looks like Andy Warhol but is able to channel his inner Rambo when the situation calls for bloodshed and firearms. This occurs almost right away, and the first monster attack comes early. It isn’t terribly scary, but then the monsters aren’t supposed to be the scary part of the story. It is the people.

The problem is with the people. Their conflicts feel forced, since they seem to go against what one would assume about human nature. No matter how much your neighbour might hate you, if you are put in a situation where creatures are attempting to eat you, you would try to get along with that neighbour, no? And if thirty people tell you that something in the mist is eating people, your first reaction is not likely to be “this must be an elaborate practical joke being played on me by everyone”. It would more likely be something like “there might well be things in the mist that want to eat me”. So the whole human-emotions-at-their-basest theme becomes a little comic bookish. There are also some cheesy, irritating speeches about the nature of humanity, which seem to have a greater purpose, but nothing really rings true.

The people in the store have been trapped there for two days. Two days, and already they have split into two factions. The reasonable people who want to work to get out of there, and the far larger group of people who listen to the horrible bible-thumping religious zealot woman and decide to sacrifice children. This could work if it was done better. But it isn’t. The Mist has two things going for it. First of all, it does what good horror movies are supposed to do. Which is to make some kind of social and political commentary out of the horror. That comment here is basically that if you scare people enough, you can get them to do anything and follow anyone. I wonder what that’s directed toward? And secondly, the ending. Although it doesn’t save the whole movie, it certainly comes as a surprise, and you can definitely chalk it up among the most shocking endings to a movie.

One more thing - if you’re going to have creatures from “another dimension” that “cross over into our world”, wouldn’t you expect those creatures to be something cool that you’ve never seen before? If they were just giant locusts and pterodactyl-men and monster spiders, wouldn’t you think someone had created them here? Just a thought.