The Wallflower Report

So I saw this movie called The Mist the other day. It was like a horror movie and once again I didn’t quite hear the name of the movie we were going to see. I thought it was called “The Missed” and so I was expecting a movie where the spirits of all the children who were listed on milk cartons and never found come back to take their revenge on a world that let them languish and die and it seems like the spirits are going to kill everybody and then somebody realizes that as milk carton spirits they would be like reverse lactose intolerant and they kill them all with soy milk.

But it turns out it was something completely different.

It turns out that this movie was based on a novella by Stephen King and that the computer game Half-Life was sort of loosely inspired by it too. If you don’t know Half-Life was the first-person shooting game from the 90s where like a government funded experiment with a dimensional teleporter accidentally like broke reality and opened up holes to a nightmarish other world full of monsters and stuff.

Um no not that game.

Not that one either.

Anyway Half-Life was important because before that not only did all first-person shooting games have the exact same story but the story didn’t actually matter because you just went from one level to another shooting at things and sometimes pushing buttons the size and shape of your guy’s head which was like a milking pail. Half-Life actually played out a whole story from beginning to end and they had a novelist write it for them. It really raised the bar for future games and brought it down repeatedly on their heads in a series of smashing blows.

“The bar” in this case is a crowbar which is like the signature weapon of the main character Dr. Gordon Freeman, Pee Aych Dee. It’s symbolic of the fact that he’s a physicist and so he knows how to apply leverage and stuff to the soft, squishy heads of his alien foes.

But um anyway this is about the movie The Mist. The Mist is a horror movie and like most horror stories it is A Cautionary Tale that teaches young people A Valuable Lesson.

In this case the point of the story is a warning against the danger of Not You Know Maybe Waiting Five Minutes Before Putting Your Unspoken Murder-Suicide Pact Into Effect When You Run Out Of Gas While Driving Through A Hellish Interdimensional Fog.

 I for one think it’s high time that Hollywood chose to address this issue with a major motion picture. Even just one life lost to the ravages of Not You Know Maybe Waiting Five Minutes Before Putting Your Unspoken Murder-Suicide Pact Into Effect When You Run Out Of Gas While Driving Through A Hellish Interdimensional Fog is one life too many.

Though now that I think about it can you really have just one life lost to a murder-suicide pact? I think that would just be a murder.

Or a suicide.

I’m gonna go play some Half-Life.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 8:44 am and is filed under Movies, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.