'The Stand' (2020)

I came to Stephen King a little later than everyone else; when I was a kid, I was more about sneaking James Herbert books off the library shelves and trying to find all the gory stuff. When I finally got round to it though, I never looked back. I love a bit of Stephen King, if anyone is the 'American Tolkien', it's him (but that's a post for another day, maybe).

If there's anything better than a Stephen King book, it's a 'big, fat Stephen King book' that you can get lost in for days so it's no surprise that my two favourites are 'It' and 'The Stand'. Having just spent the last two days binging on the TV show, I'm itching to pick the book up again so don't be too surprised if you see a 'The Stand' post soon. In the meantime though, I've just spent all that time watching the show so I might as well tell you all about that first ;o)

Fair warning time, I'm aiming for impartial but I'm a fan at the same time so I might not hit that target. Just so you know...

I'm guessing that you've probably read the book, or seen either of the TV shows, so I'm not going to go into a massive blurb here. I'll do a little one though..

A super virulent strain of the flu has escaped confinement and killed over 99% of the worlds population. For those that are left, it's time to decide where to make their stand...

Well, the original plan was to spread this out over two or three posts, and watch a few episodes at a time, but here I am having watched the whole lot at once. That should tell you everything you need to know, about what I thought of 'The Stand' but that doesn't make for much of a post so lets see if I can elaborate.

'The Stand' isn't a prefect adaptation of the book but when you look at the insane amount of detail in the book, you can give the TV show a break ;o) I don't think there's any such thing as a 'perfect adaptation', in this case, but what we've got here is as close as anyone could reasonably expect to get so I'm happy. Well, I say 'happy'... I never got to see 'The Kid' but something had to give, you're not going to fit all of it in. And why did Flagg send the Trashcan Man to pick up a nuke instead of sending the right people out to the silo and just firing it from there?

That's a minor quibble though, 'The Stand' was very watchable and it was so easy to just keep saying 'oh go on, one more episode'... It's a good mix of 'survival horror' and 'straight up horror' with engaging characters making all those tough decisions that you'd expect to see.

I for one really enjoyed the way they mixed up present day drama with flashbacks to Captain Trips breaking society down back in the day. Instead of having a manic first half followed by a more sedate second, we get a mixture of action and drama that's more evenly spread over the whole thing and that's what made it so easy to keep following it.

I wasn't a hundred percent sold on the final episode but get the rationale behind it and to be fair, a particular character was under served, in the book, and deserved a little time spent on them here. I think it was more about me thinking 'but the book ended here...' rather than anything wrong with the actual episode.

If I'm into something, on the TV, then I tend to focus on the good performances rather than the bad. I don't think there were any bad performances, to be honest, but the standout ones for me were Jovan Adepo's Larry 'on a mission to redemption' Underwood and of course, Alexander Skarsgard's Randall Flagg, all 'restrained evil' that's all the more frightening once it's let off the leash.

Not a bad adaptation, all in all, then. A 'Friday evening and most of Saturday' well spent ;o) Now I need to go and read the book again...