Review of The Thing (2011) by Uniqueusername — 28 Aug 2015

This movie is good, both as a prequel to the Carpenter's 1982 The Thing, and as a stand-alone movie. Just because it's not an excellent movie, which the 1982 The Thing is, does not make it a bad movie.

Matthijs van Heijningen (the director) is a big fan of John Carpenter's The Thing and put a lot of though and effort into this movie in order to make it tie nicely to the events of the other movie, and to put the same details from the Norwegian camp into this one.

The director had a tough task of both borrowing elements from Carpenter's film and staying close to the basic structure and story, but also making it new and different, so that fans of the 1982 film would want to watch this one and not see a less-good exact copy.

I think the director pulled this off fairly well. He found the right balance between old and new imo. I won't go into detail about exactly what was old-ish and new-ish in the movie, as this might be kind of a spoiler and ruin your experience a little bit (if you're reading this and have not seen this movie).

Now, let's talk more about this movie. The cast does a good job and the performances are mostly convincing. A bit more character development would not have hurt, though. The tone of the movie (music, atmosphere, tension), while not as effective as the 1982 film, is still there and works quite well.

The story, plot, and especially the pacing was handled really well imo. Speaking about plot, there are some plot holes and illogical situations in the movie, which at times took me a bit out of the movie.

The creature designs were cool, but they are mostly CGI, and while the CGI is fine for the most part, it relies a bit too much on it, and in a few scenes it looks rather bad. The CGI was especially noticeable in the end, and even though I liked the ending into the credits, the 5-10 minutes before that was handled a bit sloppily and was quite predictable.

My main complaints of this movie are the lack of character development, the over-reliance on CGI, some plot holes/illogical situations, and the 5-10 minutes before the ending credits. But, overall this movie is as I said before, a good movie.