The Mist was an excellent story and great movie. The series however was extremely disappointing. The first episode was rough, did not really build up the suspense and the suspense never really gets built up. Each subsequent episode begins to degrade from there. There are some very good actors, but some of the roles are poorly cast. I did enjoy seeing Alsya Sutherland in something outside of Vikings and she does a good job with what she has to work with in the role. There are times when the story threatens to become good, but in general the pace is slow and the drama thick. It is like a soap opera moved into Stephen King land. On a plus side, while the series goes out of it's way at the expense of the plot and story to embed modern Hollywood clichés that you see in pretty much each and every movie and TV series today, at least some of these clichés are turned into bad guys. One of the few redeeming qualities, but it did have me skipping parts here and there.
The special effects are very low budget. The action is lame even for a TV series and poorly directed. It is also difficult to find anybody to like much less identify with. At times you find yourself rooting for the Mist which is not the same Mist that is portrayed in the movie. Flawed characters are one thing, but the few people you can actually like do not last long. Apparently the moral of the story is that humans do not deserve to live as each and every one of us is flawed beyond redemption. Many of the depictions are pointless and distractions and opportunities to insert action and suspense are the casualties of the poor plot development which moves like Molasses in an ice storm. Most of the "surprises" are rather predictable. One of the elements that makes King's work so interesting is you never really know. Good guys can lose or win in a King story. People do unpredictable things in King stories but their actions at least make sense in the framework of their perspective. In this series people just do things apparently without reason or cause. At points the interactions just defy all logic and you have no perspective to put them in as the characters are doing things nobody would ever do given that person's perspective. People can be cruel, can be weak, but there's always some sort of logical framework they are operating under. Even if the reasoning is flawed it at least makes sense in a way to that person and creates a trajectory. A path they will follow. In the Mist these people bounce around like a pinball machine committing actions that contradict everything they do, say and believe.
In the end you are left with a bowl of tired clichés and a plot that has no drive, no energy or even meaning. The social commentary is used like a club and offensive at best. The writer or director must truly loath themselves and by proxy all of humanity, but not even in an interesting way. The holes in the plot and the slow speed leave you with an incomprehensible soup of poorly copied movie moments changed just enough that they are not really recognizable, but also neither original or interesting. I gave this a 5 because it does have a moment here and there that is interesting, and some of the acting is quite good.
