Supernatural Sci-Fi Drama : "The Stand"

King began working on Confrontation almost immediately after graduating from The Shining, then residing in Boulder, Colorado. Usually a prolific writer this time got stuck for three long years - the fault is the scale at which the author swung, who always wanted to write his own version of The Lord of the Rings, but in an American setting, and ... one of the creators of Doctor Who, Terry Nation.

In the 75th, when King was just starting to write his Magnum opus, Nation created the TV series Survivors for the BBC about a group of people who survived an apocalyptic plague pandemic, which was accidentally released by Chinese scientists and spread throughout the world through air travel, and a year later the writer published book based on his series.

King, who by that time was finishing the draft version of "Confrontation", was not at all happy about the similarity of the setting and the plot, because he already had enough problems - having placed in the book a huge number of main and secondary characters and many independent plot lines, the king of horror rested on the writing block. He more and more disliked the motivation and actions of the heroes who began to revive technology after the end of the world.

The act is completely logical and expected, but running counter to the theme of mysticism and divine providence, which, according to the author's plan, should have dominated the book. In the end, King coped with the block, after which he sarcastically remarked that for this he “needed to kill only half of the main cast” of the positive characters, but the misadventures did not end there.

From the point of view of the plot, everything is the same - due to a leak in a secret government laboratory, a superflu strain, popularly nicknamed Captain Trips, gets out, after which the population of humanity begins to rapidly decline. The survivors are divided into two camps - the righteous gather in Boulder, coming there after those whom the prophetess Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) calls in their dreams, from where they, according to God's plan, will revive life, but without such dependence on technology. Sinners come to Las Vegas to worship the Man in Black (Alexander Skarsgard), who plays the role of Antichrist. Of course, the two camps cannot simply coexist, which means that the very confrontation is coming.

The new miniseries in many ways scrupulously follows the letter of the original, but the more you look, the more you become convinced that Boone places the wrong accents and cuts out the wrong thing. So, the vast majority of key events got on the screen, and with minimal changes, which even the best film adaptations of the king of horrors cannot boast, but almost all the secondary plot twists and the famous King's routine have sunk into oblivion, which is why the series takes on a rather insane pace, completely not peculiar to “Opposition”.

Here something happens all the time, the characters have no time for reflection or for building convincing relationships, and the audience has no chance to become attached to the characters. New characters continue to pour out of the bucket, old ones die without causing much emotional shock.

The whole road to Boulder is shamelessly castrated, in the outset we see the beginning of the epidemic, get acquainted with the key characters, find out how they react to the beginning of the extinction of humanity (how humanity itself reacts to this fact, for the most part remains behind the scenes), and then everything : welcome to the saving harbor, we have the burning of corpses on stream here, we give out freshly cleaned houses to new arrivals, do not forget to visit Mother Abigail. By the way, oh, she's already gone. It's the same with Las Vegas. Of all the supporters of Randall Flagg, only Lloyd Henrid (Nat Wolff) deserves adequate backstory, the rest are not given attention.

The Pyromancer Trash Can (Ezra Miller) comes to Vegas alone. For a viewer familiar with the book, such haste and fragmentation, of course, can upset, but they are unlikely to completely spoil the viewing pleasure, but beginners will clearly wonder why this is considered one of the main works of Stephen King. And they will be right, if King wrote The Confrontation as directed by Boone, the book would not have gained much popularity. Although the cast here turns out to be much better than in the previous film adaptation, except that Ruby Dee looked much more convincing in the image of a God-fearing old woman than Whoopi Goldberg, and Matt Frewer's Trash Can was more natural, Ezra Miller played some absolutely wild and mad monkey with a grenade.

Summing up, I would like to once again focus on the fact that almost everything that got on the screen is as close to the original source as possible (frankly, only the change in the storyline of Nadine and the stupid denouement in Vegas are striking), and if the memories of the plot of the book are fresh, then there are special problems with viewing should not arise, the memory will help restore all the missing fragments. Of course, it is difficult to guarantee the delight of watching, but still it is not “Haven”, “Mist” and certainly not “Under the Dome”, which is already a small plus.

And it's worth watching the series at least for the sake of a new ending. He was never completely satisfied with King, and for the last three decades the author has been thinking about how to supplement it. It turned out, I must say, excellent, so if you react painfully to the slightest deviations from the canon, then you can safely skip all episodes from the third to the eighth and go directly to the ninth. And yes, brace yourself, Boone is already working on the script for Talisman.

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