Fun with Tentacles, Part I

Oh god, The Mist. For the most part I agree with Dave’s criticisms of the film, and I was surprised at how differently many critics reacted. A distressingly large number of people got on board with The Mist‘s politics, although some of the lower scorers seem to get it (“Less horrific than it is horribly didactic,” from the Hollywood Reporter, is my favorite summation). As I picked the recent DVD release apart – spoilers ahoy – I found a lot to dislike.

I’ve heard words like “bold” and “timely” applied to this film’s approach to religious fundamentalism. In regard to the former, a Hollywood film on this subject is anything but, and for the latter, its three to four years past the peak of a particular breed of religious neo-conservatism that has been on the wane since the 2004 election, if not earlier.

Most of the movie’s mistakes are concentrated in its antagonist, Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), who believes the monsters are divine retribution. A dreadfully conceived and executed character, she harangues, insults, and threatens her way through the film, going so far as to stroke a child’s chin while talking about doomsday; basically everything short of “And your little dog, too!” Midway through the story, in a gesture that writer/director Frank Darabont (of Shawshank Redemption fame) must have thought was subtle and nuanced, a biker says something to the effect of “I believe in God too, lady; I just don’t think he’s the bloodthirsty asshole you make him out to be.” That’s about the closest the movie comes to any countervailing spiritual characterization, and its woefully inadequate.

I won’t even speculate about the movie’s intended message on the military, which is less oppressive but far more confusing. The military is both responsible for the monsters’ appearance at the beginning of the film and their defeat at the end. Private Jessup (Sam Witwer) is sacrificed to the monsters by a crazed mob, and its possible this is intended to be analogous to the deaths of rank-and-file troops in Iraq. But groping for such a conclusion is stretching to find meaning in The Mist‘s muddle.

It’s frustrating because the premise is such a classic one with so much potential. If the violence and monsters within the mist had stayed primarily implied and the focus had been within the store, the filmmakers could have set up a social battle with more subtle religious undertones. How terrifying would it have been if Mrs. Carmody had begun the film as a relatively normal character who proceeded to slip off the edge? What if an early scene had indicated she was the hero’s son’s Sunday School teacher and had suggested some level of familiarity between them? A critique of religious fundamentalism can’t hinge on a caricature that begins the film at full bore, blithering about damnation in lakes of fire. It has to hinge on characters that are everyday people on every day except the one in which everything goes wrong.

The Twilight Zone is mentioned in many reviews of this film, and it is the most unwarranted of the movie’s praises. In Twilight Zone episodes like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” normal people in abnormal situations behave in extreme but believable ways. The external threats are almost afterthoughts in those stories, because they aren’t nearly as interesting or scary as the ways in which a group of people acts under pressure. Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone writers got it; Frank Darabont didn’t.

The War on Terror Just Got a Bit More Terrifying

From the “better late than never” file, hey, we’re at war! We should make some films about it!

After years of workmanlike to middling to non-existent cinematic responses to the “war on terror” and the (entirely separate and mostly unrelated) war in Iraq, 2008 is finally seeing some more adventurous films on those subjects. There are, of course, some traditional films, including the soldiers’ stories of Stop Loss and Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib documentary Standard Operating Procedure.

But there’s also Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, a stoner comedy that has been polarizing critics with its political (or apolitical?) message. Super Size Me director and star Morgan Spurlock, who has a knack for clever film names, has returned with Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? and intends to answer just that question. Bulletproof Salesman, a documentary, is entirely devoted to a war profiteer selling armored cars to international forces in Iraq.

Regardless of their formats or politics, none of these films could easily be dismissed as cookie cutter approaches to the United States’ overseas conflicts. But one of the most distinctive yet may still be The Objective. It deals with a small Special Forces group that heads into the Afghan mountains and find that there are more than just Taliban hooligans waiting for them. More, as in freaky supernatural goings-on.