"The Mist" is director Frank Darabont's remake of Stephen King's novel of the same name on the big screen 13 years after he directed "The Shawshank Redemption." A military experiment failed, and alien creatures came to the town through a time-space tunnel and attacked humans. Because the military hides the truth, people don't know the truth. There was a power outage in the town, communications were down, and people went to the supermarket to snap up. Suddenly, the alarm sounded in the city, and a bloody old man fled into the supermarket from the fog. "There was something strange in the fog, and John Lee was taken away." In one sentence, the people who were shopping were put into panic...
The supermarket is a microcosm of the ecology of the small town. People here have differences in class, skin color, and beliefs. When they are in peace on weekdays, everyone can greet each other happily and ask for warmth. At this time, the contradictions and conflicts that could not be reconciled and suppressed on weekdays all broke out in such a closed space, and the close neighbors became familiar strangers. Compared with disaster films such as "2012" and "The Day After Tomorrow", which focus on visual effects, this film chooses an ordinary supermarket as the scene, and focuses on the people in the disaster to observe their struggles in the face of hope and despair with conflict. At first, people thought it was a chemical explosion that produced poisonous gas, so they dared not go out rashly and waited for rescue in the supermarket. For the sake of her child at home alone, a mother insisted on rushing home despite everyone's dissuasion. Everyone watched her back nervously until she disappeared into the mist. It turns out that there is no poison in the fog, people temporarily put down the stone in their hearts, and the film gives everyone a temporary hope. The neighbor of the hero David is a black lawyer. The lawyer considers himself an elite class, but because of his skin color and his identity as an outsider, he feels that he is looked down upon by the locals. The mixture of superiority and inferiority complex, plus the conflicts of race, class and region , which made him out of tune with the town. When David found the monster in the mist, he immediately thought of telling the lawyer, but the lawyer's response was that David was teasing himself, "Sorry, I'm not that stupid, you want me to make a fool of yourself, you hillbilly take me as a joke Look", seeing that the mother who had just left the house was safe, and to prove himself, the lawyer decided to be the savior of the small town - to move the rescue. People tie ropes to the people they are traveling with so that they can know the safe area around them. Watching the rope decrease a little bit, people's hearts also mentioned their throats, suddenly the rope tightened, and the other end was a huge force beyond human imagination! When everyone tried their best to pull the rope back, they found that only the bloody bodies of the entourage were left, which was horrifying, and despair was immediately written on everyone's faces.
In addition to lawyers, the film also focuses on repairmen, soldiers, supermarket managers and religious fanatics (goddess sticks), all of whom are representatives of the town's ecology. The repairman was an overzealous man: he was always the first to express his opinion on anything. David said that there were monsters in the fog, and he immediately ridiculed it as a joke. After being frightened by the real monsters, he surrendered to David; Pay attention to those around us, there are some overzealous people like this, but they are often the ones who have a weak sense of presence and are the easiest to turn against. The soldier stayed in the supermarket in order to date his little lover. After witnessing his lover being killed by a monster, he had a nervous breakdown and finally became a sacrifice to the goddess stick. The supermarket manager is a loyal fan of David. His marksmanship is precise, and he kills the goddess stick at a critical moment, saving the bewitched people. The goddess stick has a heavier role in this film. She takes advantage of people's insanity in desperation to fan the flames: some people here have "provoked God's anger" to bring harmless disasters, so these people should be put to death, and their sacrifices should be used to appease God's anger. It turned out that what is more terrifying than monsters is the human heart. People actually extended the killing to their compatriots, and everyone in the supermarket was in danger. The goddess stick is the director's second perspective. Through her, the audience sees the betrayal of the repairman, learns the truth of the secret experiment from the mouth of the soldier, and witnesses the cruel reality that people protect themselves by sacrificing their compatriots, reflecting the darkness of human nature. one side. The goddess sticks the flag of religion, but leads people to death, so most viewers will hate her. In fact, she is an indispensable role in the ecology of the town. Americans believe in religion. When people have no hope of survival in reality, they will inevitably turn to religion for help, and seek spiritual liberation with the help of religion. However, everything has two sides. Religion can save people, but it can also harm people.
Doomsday, ecological collapse, and human torture are all common techniques used in disaster films. Creating within the fixed framework of genre films can maximize the box office success of the film, so Hollywood calls it the "film industry". The audience watching disaster films does not simply feel fear, but fantasizes about becoming the protagonist, turning fear into strength, and achieving a clear victory. It is only by sharing weal and woe with the protagonist that we have a sense of immersion in watching the movie. Therefore, in disaster films, individual heroism is often the main line, the hope of the protagonist is contrasted with the despair of everyone, and the protagonist is saved with faith and hope. In the first half of the film, David first rescued the repairman from the monster's claws, then organized everyone to fight the monster at night, and then risked his life to go to the pharmacy to find medicine for the injured. In the terrifying atmosphere created by the goddess stick and the believers, David did not want to sit still and rushed into the fog with his children and friends. After many twists and turns, he finally hid in a car and drove out of the town. work. But a brilliant stroke comes at the end: the car runs out of fuel, and David and his party are trapped in fog, with no water or food, just a dead silence. In desperation, David used the only 4 bullets left to end the lives of others in the car, and he also got out of the car, ready to die. But at this time, the roar of the machine was heard in the distance. The monster did not appear, but the military tank was seen from a distance. The soldiers were holding weapons and were destroying the remaining monsters. The town was saved!
So ironic! This is an ending that no one could have imagined. The protagonist fell at the moment before dawn, and killed his relatives and friends with his own hands. The director did not let him die, but brutally let him witness all this. "The Mist" is a movie in which the protagonist "admits defeat": the most desperate thing is not the constant fear, but the constant giving of hope and taking it away. Under this repeated mental torture, there is no so-called hero at all!
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