Review of The Thing (2011) by Johnmilas — 15 Oct 2011

One thing to say right off the bat is that this is miles better than today's sci-fi and horror offerings. I'm not saying that it's miles and miles better, but it does have an edge. It starts out slow and builds up like the old days; like Carpenter's 1982 incarnation of the story.

When comparing it to today's genre films, I'm inclined to give it a better rating, somewhere around a 7. When compared to Carpenter's film, my hands are tied. It's nowhere near the level of masterpiece that Carpenter's film is.

The reason being that this film does not focus on any of the plot points and themes that the original film does. Carpenter's film is about paranoia. It's about waiting to see what happens next instead of really having the ability to do anything about it.

It's about people being frustrated with this inability to confront their enemies (because they don't know who they are) and frustrated with each other. None of Carpenter's characters could ever work together to solve a problem because of their paranoia.

Paranoia is dealt with in this 2011 prequel for about fifteen minutes. Paul WS Anderson might as well have directed this movie. By that I mean that most of the characters are killed off in a very short amount of time and then we're left with a chase scene that lasts for the final 30% of the running time.

Instead of things flowing organically and naturally like in Carpenter's film, this movies is simply just a series of events happening one after another. There's no time for us to speculate as to who isn't a human being.

..someone will suddenly just spring out of their skin and grow tentacles. This becomes jarring instead of actually frightening. That being said, the creature designs are now not as original or scary. Rob Bottin was able to create creatures for the original film that were hard to look at.

We didn't know where the front was, where the eyes were in some cases. They were formless and disturbing. The monster's now have obvious mouths and teeth reaching out for their victims which becomes easier for our minds to digest and easier to look at.

This is thanks to the slowly declining efforts of Amalgamated Dynamics' Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis who cut their teeth working for Stan Winston. Overall I think this is a decent movie, but instead of trying to get us to think, it just wants us to react.

It wants our reactions to unimpressive CGI effects and jump scares, neither of which were at all prevalent in the 1982 original. This movie looks fake and feels artificial. In the end though, it still beats most of the other science fiction and horror films that have been released within the past few years.

It's also more satisfying than other series offerings such as AvP and Predators.