The Stand Review - Variety
02 May 1994
Filmed in Utah, Nevada, New York and Pennsylvania by Laurel Entertainment in association with Greengrass Prods. Executive producers, Richard P. Rubinstein, Stephen King; supervising producer, Peter McIntosh; producer, Mitchell Galin; director, Mick Garris; writer, Stephen King, based on his novel; In "The Stand," Stephen King designs a post-apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil. ABC leaps into May sweeps with an ambitious, eight-hour visualization of King's expansive 1978 novel, scripted by the author. While it's no "V," it's not bad; the mini probably would have played better at six hours, but should sustain the interest of King fans, who number in the millions, and may pick up some non-King followers.
The basic plan is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in that ordinary people, evidently randomly selected, are compelled by an unknown impetus to gather for an unknown purpose.
In this case, there are two forces: Good, personified by a 106-year-old black woman, Mother Abigail (Ruby Dee), living in Nebraska, and Evil, one Randall Flagg (Jamey Sheridan), an "apostate of hell" who occasionally takes the form of a crow.
The backdrop is a killer epidemic, released when a government biological warfare experiment misfires; before long, practically everybody in the U.S. is dead or dying. (King has said the original prototype was Legionnaires' disease, updated to an AIDS parallel when he rewrote the book in the mid-'80s.)
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