The Mist (Blu-ray/Weinstein
Company)
Picture:
B+ Sound: B+ Extras: C
Film: D
Do you
know how you can tell a good thriller from a bad one? A good thriller (once the ‘reveal’ is made)
leaves you satisfied, but once the reveal happens in a bad film, you only wish
you could go back in time and never start watching the film in the first
place. Frank Darabont’s adaptation of
Stephen King’s The Mist is a severe
case of a bad thriller that starts off with tons of potential only to let us
down once we encounter …the Mist.
We’ve
already covered ground with this film before on DVD, you can read more about
that here:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6797/The+Mist
What’s
changed since then? Nothing. What does this Blu-ray have to offer that the
DVD didn’t? Well, not a whole lot,
except for a marginally better performance in both picture and sound. The extras are the same as before, although
one nice touch here is that you can watch the film in the original colorized
version, or choose a B&W version of the film. Both, regardless of how cool this feature is,
fail.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 1080p digital High Definition transfer
corrects some of the issues from the standard definition DVD, and removes much
of the softness that was attributed to the compression there, but here we get a
detailed picture that demonstrates the best the Blu-ray has to offer,
especially in scenes that are purposefully soft due to the ‘mist’. These scenes still retain sharpness and
definition throughout. Colors are good
as well, but the digital creations are far too phony looking to work and are
not silly enough to even work as a good, yet cheesy effect.
As with
the picture, here the sound is pumped up from the DVD with a superior Dolby
Digital TrueHD 5.1 mix that works very well for the subject matter and brings
forth an abundance of direction and surround effects that would have been the
case on the DVD if it had been issued in DTS, but that disc only received a
Dolby Digital mix that was far too compressed and limiting in nature.
Darabont’s
adaptations of Stephen King’s Shawshank
Redemption and The Green Mile
proved to be both critical and commercial successes, but despite those two
films giving him some directing clout, he can’t keep the pace for his third
outing and perhaps he should stick to the non-horror genre films instead.
- Nate Goss
