Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2012-09-27 06:43 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2012-09-27 06:43 pm
[ SECRET POST #2095 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2095 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 020 secrets from Secret Submission Post #299.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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And of course, she had a messiah complex the size of the Chrysler Building.
I call those characters in King stories "The fanatics". It's not religion the problem, is how... blind they become to everything that is not being the messengers of whatever pet thing they get for their own adoration system.
And I agree. I have no idea why King said the movie ending was better. I wanted to go and hit him with my hardcover copy of Skeleton Crew. The movie ending comes out of nowhere, is a disservice to the characters and makes an otherwise wonderful adaptation into a bad episode of the Twilight Zone... the remake
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And my beef is not with the soldiers mobilizing to fight the monsters because yes, the way the movie treats the situation, it's pausible. No. My beef is with the characters' actions mere seconds before the army appears.
The main drive of those particular characters was the will to stay alive. They had survived horrible odds just to get out of the market and then just... 'oh, well, the gas ran out, lets kill ourselves' is.. well, stupid. And the fact that they never HEARD the mobile armour... that's what makes it horrible and comes out of nowhere.
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(Anonymous) 2012-09-28 03:35 am (UTC)(link)no subject
The timing of the tanks, the fact that they were the stealthiest tanks in the universe, and how the mist magically gets blown away by fans? Sorry, no.
Eldrich abominations from beyond the space and time barrier do not get waved away that easily.
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Yeah, the timing was off, but that was almost certainly a pacing issue. If he'd sat on the ground for an hour after shooting everyone it would have elongated the ending and broken the pacing, even if it would have been unrealistic.
That said, I interpreted it that the mist severely dampened sound? Otherwise why could they not hear ten to twenty foot monsters creeping up right behind them in the mist? Why could they not hear the screams/struggling of the man who went to get the shotgun a mere hundred feet away? A buddy who watched later came to the exact same conclusion whilst watching it, so I think it may have been implied? Even so, it would change nothing dramatically/metaphorically if they'd cut to the tanks rolling up an hour later rather than a few seconds.
I saw it as a condemnation of those horror films (of which there are many) in which people do kill themselves rather than face what they see as a hopeless situation, or those people who say they would faced with those circumstances. Moreover, those people who did the smart thing (staying in the store) survived. I loved that part. The protagonist's group did something stupid and they paid the price for it. People do stupid things in horror flicks all the time.
I did notice on Rotten Tomatoes that a reviewer's score of the film was directly inversely proportional to how butthurt the ending made them, hahahah.
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Also, as Anon said above... A man walking into the mist is not the same as the whole freaking army. It changes a lot if it was an hour of him walking aimlessly through the mist (which could've done with a single cut) than getting the tanks seconds after he shot his son.
And no, the people in the mall DIDN'T do the smart thing, as their idea of 'doing the smart thing' included killing a small child. Not only that, the person who did the most stupid thing in the whole film (the woman who walked alone, unarmed, and without any protection through the mist) made it alive too. Seriously? When not two hours later a group of five were made mincemeat?
What they did wasn't stupid. they had a plan, and it included getting the hell away from the crazy people who were about to start killing others to appease an imaginary bloodthirsty god created from the mind of a very disturbed woman. Because, when the mist didn't go away after they killed the kid and the woman (They were going to kill 'the whore', remember?), who was to say they wouldn't be next?
And that's the thing. The original ending WAS a condemnation of people killing themselves rather than face a hopeless situation. The very last word of the novella is "hope".
Also, the movie is great. Is one of the best adaptations of a King' novel I've seen in a long time. But you can't call everyone who sees the ending as a huge asspull from the director 'butthurt' about it.
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(Anonymous) 2012-09-28 05:43 am (UTC)(link)You can when they start ragging on King for liking the movie better. How dare the guy like the changes they don't when it's his story in the first place.
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Personally, I don't understand how he can like it. I hate the ending. But I hope you realize that "I want to hit him with my hardcover of Skeleton Crew" is a huge hyperbole and I *really* don't want to do that.
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(Anonymous) 2012-09-28 03:14 pm (UTC)(link)If they start trash-talking King himself for not liking it? Yes, they are. It's his story, not theirs.
Personally, I don't understand how he can like it. I hate the ending. But I hope you realize that "I want to hit him with my hardcover of Skeleton Crew" is a huge hyperbole and I *really* don't want to do that.
I realize that. But implying that he's lost Cool Points or whatever for having a differing opinion on an adaptation of -- and I can't stress this enough -- his story, not yours reeks of hilarious butthurt.
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Killing themselves because they ran out of fuel wasn't stupid? The entire thrust of your rant seems to contradict this statement. Running from the store wasn't stupid, but that wasn't why they died. They died because they gave up, and that was (and you seem to agree) stupid. Not sure what you're arguing here, because it seems to be against yourself.
The original ending WAS a condemnation of people killing themselves rather than face a hopeless situation.
So's this one, though, in a much more effective way (in my opinion, and in King's too, evidently, though you seem not to agree - you're certainly free to argue that but it was in no way an "asspull").
But you can't call everyone who sees the ending as a huge asspull from the director 'butthurt' about it.
Sure I can, when you've made zero internally consistent statements and your whole problem is the tanks coming out of nowhere when a twenty-foot, several ton monster creeps up behind Ollie in the parking lot just minutes before that in the movie. You agree that them killing themselves is stupid, which was my whole point, and was the director's whole point, too, yet you're complaining about it? Or is the whole thing just a pacing issue that would be negated if we'd seen him wander though the mist for a while or they'd clarified that the mist dampened sound?
Ultimately, it wasn't an asspull at all: it was entirely consistent with the themes the movie (and apparently the novel) had established, just in a different way. A really unhappy way that has people really butthurt.
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The thing about the ending is... In the original book they didn't kill themselves. Their personalities weren't of people who would kill themselves at the first sign of problem. And that's my problem with it.
I'm not sure if the director really think it's a condemnation of people killing themselves or not. I have also heard that the movie ending it's a glorification of the army power, and I have yet to hear the commentary of the director to know his point of view. And yes, if the killing themselves/army appearing had been paced differently OR they'd clarified that the mist dampened sound, I wouldn't think the ending is such an asspull.
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I think, having read the novel, you probably got a much stronger sense of the characters than I did. From what I saw of them just in the movie, the dad wanting to kill his son after the son had made him promise "not to let the monsters get (him) no matter what" seemed very consistent. He just want to spare them what he thought was inevitably, painful death (which was wrong, as you agree).
Oh, okay. Fair enough. I think it would have lost some of the impact if it had been paced differently, but for sure it would have been more realistic. But I 100% read it as a condemnation of people killing themselves - I don't think King would have liked it as much as he did if the director had meant something different from his intent, either? Is my view.
See, I really liked that military is so effective here. In most horror films they're (necessarily) useless so a plucky band of heroes with no training or real firepower can save the day. But why would they be? The revolver is extremely effective against the monsters, which means better guns would do even better, right? Like I said, I haven't read the novel, but if 12 .45 rounds can kill several monsters dead, and thin sheet metal can stop even the biggest and strongest monsters, a 20" reinforced steel BTR with a .50 turret is going to kill hundreds. And the US military has lots where that came from. I can't stand it when the military just shits their pants in horror films while an untrained civilian saves the day, personally. I'm glad the movie didn't go that route.
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The problem is that, it's an amazing adaptation of the novel. Usually with King novels, I have no problem separating novel from movie. Here? The characterization is perfect (Ending non-withstanding), the casting is excellent (Even when I wouldn't have cast Norm as a PoC to avoid any misunderstandings, or would've probably cast more PoCs for other characters), and the imagery of what the monsters look like is just right... and then the ending is like an absolute curve ball. So, it's hard to me to accept David and his last solution.
Because he also promises his son that in the novel, but there he's very clear that he's going to keep them all alive. So it's a quite jarring change from the original.
Finally, well, if you plan to read the novel (Or any King novel, for that matter), let me tell you that no, the army is not that effective in it. But there's no plucky band of heroes saving the day either.
Now that I think of it, King rarely gets with the army in his novels. The only other one I can see right now in my desk (yes, I'm a King- nut) are Dreamcatcher and The Stand, and in both the attitude is very much : The army, on itself, is quite effective and capable. It's just that the idiots in charge don't give all the information to the grunts who NEED the information in order to be effective.
(And if you like military being effective in horror stories, I recommend World War Z. The first act might put you out a little, but it picks up fast)
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Well I retract my statement then to "butthurt or has read the novel and disagrees with that characterization" lol. I mean that's totally reasonable. I can't stand OOCness either. If it was character-breaking for David to do it, then that's lame.
King (seems?) pretty leftist, so I'm not surprised he's not big on the military. I'm pretty left myself, so I don't mind, I just find it grating when they're cartoonishly incompetent. That's the stereotype, sure, but I don't think you'd want to count on it if you were ever up against the army.
(I've read World War Z, but it rubbed me the wrong way for an entirely different reason: why is virtually everybody who matters after the apocalypse a dude? As I recall, there's one female pilot and one mother figure and a huuuuuuge deal is made about how "unfeminine" the pilot is. Why would a male civilian scrub do better in the zombie apoc than an equally out of shape, unused to fighting woman? Bleh.)
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And yes, OOC if you know the novel. And not just for David, but for everyone in that van. Hell, I wanted Ollie to come back from the dead just to rag on them :)
King is very leftist, yes. But he also tries to be a fair writer, so he tends to go against the powers in charge, rather than against the grunts. Again, the Stand. Sure, the army lets out a horribly deadly disease... but the ones containing it are the ones who have no idea what is it. So of course there were slips and mistakes.
(MMm... I seem to remember more women being interviewed, there's the woman who had been a child in the Canada camps and now is working killing frozen zombies, and I'm sure the russian soldier is a woman, but you're right, now that I think about it. There's a lot of men on the novel. mmm... What about the Newsflesh trilogy? I didn't quite like the last book of the trilogy, but the army as efficiently scary bad guys there are amazing and the first book is very good)
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I have not read the Newsflesh trilogy, I will give it a try! After I read The Mist.
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However, what I said, was that you couldn't say that *everyone* who didn't like the ending as 'butthurt'.
(Also, I'm very sorry if you think that my statements are not internally consistent. I'd blame the hour, but it's more probable that it was due to me misunderstanding what you meant by 'them doing something stupid)
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I should really get off my ass read the novel! I loved the movie.