The Thing

This is a prequel/sequel/reboot/rework to John Carpenter's 1982 classic horror The Thing. There is the big reveal twisting the story to loop it around. They could have played with this a lot more than what they actually did. It's convoluted but I'm willing to buy it. In fact, it added something interesting. Not the same for the FX.

The aliens are now almost all CG. That's a big problem since the original had some of the most iconic real FX. It's a spit in the face for fans to replace it with CGI and it doesn't look good anyways. Going inside the saucer is a big mistake. This stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Eric Christian Olsen, but nobody really stands out. This is a good idea but executed without understanding the appeal of the original.

It's hard for anything to compare to John Carpenter's The Thing. It's one of the greatest horror films ever made, some would argue *the* best. Thankfully, they didn't go the remake route here and instead opted for a prequel that depicted the events that happened in the Norwegian camp prior to the '82 version. In that regard, this movie does an impressive job at tying some knots like showing how the two-faced thing came to be, as well as the origin of the dog from the start of Carpenter's Thing. Sadly, that's where most of the praise ends.

The Thing suffers from what plagues many horror movies these days - underwritten characters and overwhelming CGI. One of the scariest things of Carpenter's version is the practical effects of the "thing". They were horrifying. Here, all subtlety is thrown out the window in favor of huge CGI monsters. It's effectively used in a couple scenes, but the monsters lose their scariness after a while and it just becomes gratuitous. The characters themselves are paper thin. What helped make the '82 version so fantastic is that we got to know the characters, their quirks, their personalities, and we were able to empathize with their situations. In this movie, half of the characters are interchangeable. I didn't even know most of their names. And worse yet, I didn't care about any of them. There's one particular scene that calls back to Carpenter's infamous blood test scene where I realized that most of these people are really dumb and I don't care if any of them die. That's not good in a horror movie. By that point it was just a waiting game for them to get picked off one by one.

The lead performances are strong. For the material they were given, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton do a fine job. But that simply isn't enough to carry a movie like this. The Thing is supposed to be scary, and for the most part, it isn't. That's a failure by horror standards. There's some face-value entertainment to be had here, but if you're looking for a substantial prequel to Carpenter's masterpiece, you'll be sorely disappointed.

You're stationed at an isolated outpost in Antarctica when you inadvertently discover a flying saucer type spacecraft beneath the frozen surface. Not long after you discover the alien pilot, trapped inside the ice sheet, looks like he may have been there for some time. Unfortunately, after recovering the entombed alien the protocols of containment are soon dispatched to a nearby bin and, before you know it, a rather excitable shapeshifting beast, who likes to take the form of bodies that have been turned inside out, and various other parts that should be internal and not external, is causing chaos and carnage and mayhem and disaster.

While not as good as the 1981 take, it is still a spectacular piece of masterful horror that continually delivers upon each subsequent viewing and provides some depth to the John Carpenter thriller.

I didn't go see The Thing in 2011 for two reasons. One, I was reluctant to support a prequel when what I had really wanted for thirty years was a sequel. Two, the movie seemed to have vanished from the theaters only after a few weeks. In the meantime, I only heard negative things(no pun intended) about this film so I didn't feel like I was missing out.

However, something really weird happened when I finally caught it on HBO. I liked it! No, I mean I really liked it. To be clear, the criticisms about it being an unnecessary and almost too similar story to John Carpenter's classic are all fair. And, like most sic-fi movies today, there is more cgi than I would care to see. But the people making this movie clearly worship Carpenter's movie every bit as much as any die hard Thing fan. They go to great lengths to match up to the events suggested from the 1982 version and I personally appreciate them doing so. I also liked their method of detecting who was the Thing. It was different than MacReady's test but it was original.(Nothing will ever top the petri dish sequence and dialogue, Carpenter and Russell just nail it).

If you're a fan of the original looking for something completely different or a "new take" on The Thing From Another world, than this movie is not for you. But if you're like me, and always wondered who put that ax through the door or what events led up to the two-headed thing burnt up in the snow at the Norwegion compound than I highly recommend this flick.

Now now children, some people will have different opinions than you and just because it's different, doesn't make it wrong. Having read the first couple of pages of reviews here and having just seen the film only quarter of an hour ago, I felt compelled to write something about this prequel to the 1982 'The Thing'.

It's fair to say that opinion is divided on the merits of this offering, but it's also fair to say that most opinions that lambast this film are from die-hard Carpenter fans who are woefully disappointed by what they have seen, and fair play to them. No, it's not like the original movie. Go figure. It's nearly thirty years later. If you want to see the same film, go and rent it (and then watch it) twice.

Having seen the original movie maybe three or four times in the past thirty years (I was fourteen when I will have first seen it in 1983) I was quite pleasantly surprised by the end of this prequel. True, it lacks some of the tension of the original and the acting from most, if not all, was below par. I remember the wonder of the special effects taking my breath away in the early eighties. This effort failed to bring me those same kind of delightful terrors. However, this is not due to the realism or effort on the part of the film-makers.

This is purely down to my experience of horror movies throughout the past thirty years. My expectations at 42 are not the same as that 14 year old boy and I am a grisled and wisened old movie cynic these days as opposed to a wide-eyed horror newbie. I think I watched this around the same time as my pirate VHS copies of The Evil Dead and Poltergeist.

In short, this wasn't half bad. It was faithful enough the original film for my liking, though having only seen it a few times, I am far from an authority on the subject matter. Continuity sputtered from time to time and there were slightly too many plot lines left dangling for comfort, but altogether, this was an enjoyable hour and a half. Yes, it's true that you didn't feel for the characters as much as say MacReady (or whatever Russell's name was) in the first film and some of the blame for this should fall squarely on the writers. After all, bad though the acting may have been, they can only read what's on the page in front of them.

Don't be put off by the comments you read here that tell you this is nothing more than an awful pile of monkey doings, because that is judging it too harshly. It's never going to be the classic that Carpenter's film ended up being, but given the last decade of truly terrible remakes we have been forced to sit through, horror-wise, this is almost a breath of fresh air. Remember what decade you're in be thankful that whilst this is not a classic, it is better than much of what we've seen recently.