Review of The Thing (1982) by Brent A — 21 Jan 2013

John Carpenter and his team took a calculated risk with this film, betting that viewers would be so struck/amazed/repelled/gripped by the gory special effects (which still look pretty good after 30 years) that they'd overlook some pretty big holes in the script.

The Thing starts off with a bang, as two seemingly deranged Norwegians in a helicopter pursue a huskie across the snow right into an American research camp in Antarctica. We are quickly introduced to the 12 or so men in the American camp, including a helicopter pilot who drinks a lot.

This is nonsense: the most important man in the base would not be a drunk. The dog soon reveals itself to be a shape-shifting alien who may (or may not) have infected some of the camp's inhabitants.

Here's another problem with the movie: we never really get to know any of the people in the camp and therefore don't really care if they die or not (and most of them do, in particularly nasty ways).

And because none of them really have a particular identity we aren't too bothered when the survivors start to get paranoid and accuse each other of being the alien in disguise. We see too many shots of men in thick coats standing around outside in the snow and the dark and as the film wears on the special effects become increasingly outlandish.

Scenes which I remember scaring me rigid when the film came out triggered snorts of laughter from my teenage daughter. The collector's edition has an 80-minute feature on how the film was made and this in some ways is more coherent than the film.