Week in Review - The Stand (1994)

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And so we come to the end of my dive into the Stephen King films of the ‘90s.  Some were a delight, some were bizarre and dated, some were Apt Pupil, but I’ve elected to end this look back with another longtime favorite I had before even embarking on this endeavor: 1994’s The Stand.  Though not technically a movie, The Stand was part of the other wave of King adaptations at the time that arose from the world of TV.  It was a mini-series consisting of 4 episodes released over 5 days in May of 1994.  

It’s a mammoth of a mini-series and one of the four released at the time alongside the original IT, the comedically bad and often maligned Langoliers, and the mostly forgotten Tommyknockers.  As that description probably suggested The Stand is easily the best of the four and definitely deserves a spot as one of the better King adaptations of the ‘90s thanks to its well-composed focus and cast of solid TV mainstays turning in great performances.

The Stand is one of the more grandiose King stories, revolving around the end of the world and the twin groups of survivors that emerge out of it while also touching on a lot of religious and metaphysical topics as well.  The inciting incident of the story is about a deadly plague created in a laboratory by the CDC that somehow ends up managing to get out into the wild.  

That “somehow” is actually one of the film’s central conceits and cleverest ideas, that a force of malevolence is causing events to fall into a certain pattern to facilitate humanity’s twilight, a force that’s basically comparable to the devil.  I’m actually not sure how Randall Flagg, the film’s antagonist and humanized form of said dark power, actually fits into King’s broader mythos of evil powers, that’s mostly laid out in the likes of Dark Tower and isn’t really necessary reading to enjoy this story.

Our cast is massive in the true style of a disaster movie, especially as we’re seeing the comings and goings of two separate groups of individuals with a natural immunity to the man-made plague.  This ends up making the mini-series both a disaster movie AND a post-apocalypse story but one that manages to avoid some of the latter genre’s more conservative leanings.  

The initial episode revolves around the social collapse accompanied by the mass spread of the Captain Trips virus while giving us a close look at the various leaders and key players in the impending post-apocalyptic communities and is probably the mini-series best component.  This vision of the world’s slow coughing death is sobering and well shot and the large cast actually affords the story a chance to see this kind of collapse from every angle. 

After the world ending is well and truly done our various heroes and villains are drawn to two areas.  The chosen are shepherded by the wise old magic black woman Mother Abigail to what becomes known as the Boulder Free Zone.  Meanwhile, the forces of evil begin to marshal in Las Vegas under Randall Flagg, a mysterious and powerfully magical figure who has the power to be wherever he wants.  

As the battle lines are drawn between the two things get increasingly more metaphysical as a handful of the Chosen elect to make a Lord of the Rings style march to Las Vegas and, with each step closer they take, the powers of darkness slip away.  Like I said, The Stand is an esoteric movie with a lot of stuff grounded in dreams and magical thinking where the simple act of challenging darkness is enough to slowly rob it of its power. 

A lot of that “Apocalypse from the ground up” stuff hinges on the cast, who are all very, very good.  I’m loathe to point to any one character as the actual protagonist but there are a handful of standouts, both in terms of performance and writing.  

Stu Redman is one of the characters we spend the most time with, a simple man who happened to be close to the initial point of the outbreak, and he’s played by Gary Sinise.  Sinise enjoyed some major success in the ‘90s with roles in Forest Gump and Apollo 13, though more recently he was the star of CSI: New York.  He’s a very solid actor, he gives a firm and grounded performance and anchors a good deal of the movie in a realism that could’ve been lost amid all the mysticism in the latter half of the story. 

We also have Robe Lowe playing Nick, a deaf-mute character, who’s very endearing as the heart of the noble survivors and Molly Ringwald as Frannie Goldsmith, who’s basically the post-apocalyptic version of her character from any given ‘80s movie.  Ray Walston, probably best well known for his role on My Favorite Martian, also has a superb turn as Glen Bateman, the moral center of the heroes.  

Ruby Dee also does a fine job with Mother Abigail, who actually manages to be more than JUST a magic black person stereotype of the time.  She actually has a good deal of her own agency and a very interesting arc in episode 3 where she removes herself from the community she built as she feels she’s allowed herself to become a golden cow for the new chosen. 

On the flipside, the villains are led by the twin talents of Miguel Ferrer as Lloyd Henreid, a small-time crook that Flagg rescues from starvation in an abandoned jail, and Matt Frewer as Trashcan Man, a mentally unhinged arsonist.  Ferrer is one of the all-time great character actors that TV has ever facilitated and he does a fine job here as basically the inverse of Gary Sinise’s character.  

They’re both grounded everymen who’ve been swept up into worlds of God and symbolism but are still trying to make the world turn even as they live in the corpse-strewn wreckage of the society that once was.  Ferrer is also the only character who’s actually afforded a fair deal of complexity in his allegiance to Randall Flagg.  Everyone else involved is pretty unequivocally good or evil but Ferrer makes the good point that he was literally left starving in a jail cell and it wasn’t God who came to his rescue so why does he owe the lord anything? 

Matt Frewer also does a curiously understated job as Trashcan Man.  Frewer has made a whole career out of playing cartoonishly unhinged characters like Max Headroom but when he’s called upon for softer roles he actually has a lot of range.  That’s very much the case with Trashcan Man, he walks a very thin line between just human enough to be believable and actively over the top.  He’s a pyromaniac transient whose life has clearly been garbage well before the world coughed itself to death so the devil emerging out of humanity’s dusk to give him a purpose and the chance to burn the world is a naturally appealing idea but at the same time, Trash isn’t completely evil either.  He’s more of a lost soul, someone the world so thoroughly turned its back on despite needing help that it’s not really his fault the devil took him in: every other door was slammed in his face. 

The Stand is probably an acquired taste of a movie but there’s a lot to recommend here, especially if you like that cadre of actors I listed above.  There’s also a lot to appreciate here if you’ve ever found the mercenary nature of the post-apocalyptic genre to be grating.  Most stories set after the fall of man tend to focus on this weird imagined falsehood that the only path to survival is selfish brutality so it’s nice to have something like The Stand that’s all about the power of community.  

In the end, the Chosen win only partly because of their metaphysical actions but also because Flagg’s society in Las Vegas is based on a kind of brutal anarchy and violent autocracy that can only consume itself.  It’s a movie about finding hope for the future in the end of the world, which I think is a message we could all do with hearing these days. 

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