‘Mist’ misses its chance to innovate
New take blindly lurches from genre to genre
It’s too hard to see through this Mist.
Spike’s adaptation of Stephen King ’s The Mist (Thursday, 10 p.m. ET/PT,
out of
egEE four) is as impossible to decipher as the dense white cloud that enshrouds the small town in which it takes place. Is it a family drama? A crime drama? An expanded Stephen King universe?
Whatever it’s trying to be, the final result is a dull mess.
What the show isn’t is a straight adaptation of its source material: a 1980 novella. We’ve already seen that in all its terrifying, thought-provoking glory in director Frank Darabont’s 2007 film. Both are set mostly in a grocery store, where people take refuge as the mist rolls in, creating tension in the enclosed space as power dynamics change based on what the occupants believe they know about the horror outside.
The new series attempts to justify revisiting the story by presenting new characters confronting the mist in several locations, with interpersonal drama added in. The central figures are the Copelands (Alyssa Sutherland and Morgan Spector), who are reeling from the sexual assault of their daughter Alex (Gus Birney) and are separated when the mist hits. A few other stock characters make up the cast, including a soldier (Okezie Morro) who attempts to warn the town but gets locked up, and a criminal (Danica Curcic) returning to get a stash of money who’s also caught by the police.
Maybe it’s the clumsy deployment of sexual assault as a cheap plot point, or lines such as, “You know your father can’t hear you when you wear makeup,” delivered by a conservative mother to her bisexual son, but Mist’s premiere never clicks into place. The scares (and there are some genuine scares) are few and overly graphic. In tone and aesthetic, it feels like a rehash of CBS’
Under the Dome, another King adaptation that attempted to stretch its source material too far.
The current TV and film landscape is filled with remakes, revivals and reboots, and there’s room for interesting rehashes that bring new perspectives and ideas.
The Mist is definitely not one of them. One adaptation was enough.