IMDb plot summary: After a deadly plague kills most of the world's population, the remaining survivors split into two groups - one led by a benevolent elder and the other by a maleficent being - to face each other in a final battle between good and evil.
Directed by Mick Garris. Starring Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Jamey Sheridan, and Laura San Giacomo.
So, I have this longstanding problem with Stephen King's work. Or, well, film adaptations of it, since I don't think I've actually read anything by him. But the issues I have with his films are plot-based, and from reading book synopses on Wikipedia I think I'd have the same problem with them, and regardless King wrote this teleplay, so it's definitely his writing I dislike here.
The thing is, he comes up with these decently creepy premises and then throws *everything* at them without bothering to connect them. In The Shining, the hotel is full of ghosts AND Jack Torrance also just happens to be a little crazy to begin with AND his son just happens to have ESP. And it's never clear whether one is influencing the other at all, so it just looks like multiple separate stories he's trying to smush together.
The Stand is (I think mostly?) just two stories: A mysterious flu kills off most of the population, and the survivors have to fight Satan. The first half of the miniseries is about the flu and survival, the second half is about going off to fight Satan in the desert. But there's also all this weird throwaway stuff about visions from God, Satan trying to make a baby with a human woman, a healing ghost, several characters with disabilities that I don't know WHAT he's doing with them, a bunch of drama about choosing town council members, and more. All of these issues flare up with great significance like they're going to play major roles in how things go, and then they seem to be either resolved or forgotten within minutes. What does King think this story is *about*? Nothing stays, nothing holds, nothing matters.
Speaking of nothing mattering -- that final scene. The good guys are captured by Satan who decides to tear them apart at a public execution, but then one of our (very uncomfortable) disability characters shows up with an atomic bomb, and then some sort of ghost comes out of two of Satan's dead minions and sets off the bomb. And back in the town, everybody lauds the dead heroes' sacrifice and talks about how they went out there to "stand, and that's what they did." But, like... What? Aside from I guess gathering everyone in one place for the execution, nothing they did made any difference at all. (And if it's an atomic bomb, they don't need to be *that* close together for it to do the trick.) They didn't make the ghosts happen (right?), they didn't make the bomb appear, they did ab.so.lute.ly.no.thing and are treated like they saved the world.
The first hour or so is good. Watching the world get slowly taken down by the flu and seeing the survivors trying to figure out what to do next is fascinating. But when it suddenly turns into a supernatural God's-people-vs-a-literal-demon battle, it loses me entirely and tosses out a thousand threads it can never resolve well.
I don't get it, y'all. I don't get King, and I don't get this adaptation, and it was a very long four-and-a-half hours once it started going off the rails.
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Stand < Blow Out
The Stand > A Farewell to Fools
The Stand > Ulysses
The Stand < Cellular
The Stand < The Robe
The Stand > Thoughtcrimes
The Stand < Company (1997)
The Stand < Ghost
The Stand < The Love Bug
The Stand < Reality Bites
The Stand < Sunshine
The Stand > The Iceman
Final spot: #1844 out of 3029.
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