Review of The Thing (2011) by Mark G — 16 Apr 2012

A prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 movie of the same name, this 2011 release was going to have to do something very special to have any chance of matching up to Carpenter's fantastic movie. Carpenter's take on the short story by John W Campbell (Who Goes There?) did a great job of showing the human side of the story; with its mixture of paranoia and mistrust and also showcasing some great visual effects and visceral thrills that really stood out (the `defibrillator` scene and the `tied to the couch' scene for example) and were really memorable.

Not only has this film got the unenviable job of matching Carpenter's movie, it has also got to tie in a lot of events that fans of Carpenter's film are going to expect as well as appeal to a new audience that have not seen the previous film.

So did it work?

Short answer...no.

But before I go into what went wrong here's a quick rundown of the plot.

Set in Antarctica in the winter of 1982, the film opens with some great shots of this bleak and frozen wasteland. All is white and unmoving, except for one tiny spec in the distance that is soon revealed to be a lone vehicle travelling across the ice. On board are some Norwegian researchers that are following a strange signal that they have detected. As they stop near the signals source, the ice gives way beneath them and their vehicle plunges into a crevasse. There's a very brief glimpse of a strange metallic structure that is all too quickly obscured by the title sequence. From there we are introduced to a group of researchers at the Colombia University where a Norwegian Dr. convinces an American palaeontologist who has had experience of extracting remains from cold weather digs.

They soon find that the structure is in fact a spacecraft that has been buried in the ice for thousands of years and that there are also the remains of an alien being nearby.

The problem is that the alien 'Thing' isn't actually dead and is not the 'come in peace' type.

Ok, so what went wrong?

Well, a lot of the moments that were referencing events from Carpenter's version just didn't work, and worst of all felt really tacked on, a major sequence even occurred during the end credits and ended up feeling like an afterthought rather than as an actual coherent part of the story.

The non Norwegians seemed as if they were added in so as to create a broader market for the film as the basis for their presence was flimsy at best, and if I counted right there were in fact 5 non Norwegians at the Norwegian base. The whole conversation to get Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character on board boiled down to a one minute conversation in which her character was basically told, 'I know someone found a structure and a specimen in the Antarctic, will you go there with me?' and with barely a seconds thought, she readily agrees.

I just felt as if the whole story would've been much better if it had stayed with just the Norwegians trying to make sense of this strange discovery they had stumbled upon and how best they could go about studying it in secret.

This is a film that needed to have been shot in Norwegian and have been in subtitles.

As for the Thing itself, there's been nearly 30 years between the two films and yet the practical effects of John Carpenter's version are head and shoulders above the cgi creature that is displayed here. Iâ(TM)ve always felt that cgi is not a good thing to use in a horror film and should only be used (in all films, not just horror) if there is no practical way of doing it.

Here we get to see people spray out tentacles like a hentai fans wet dream but it just doesn't having the right impact or visceral thrills.

What we are left with is an average creature feature that would just about scrape in as a three star film as it's not terrible, just unimaginative but it loses a star because when it boils down to it, it's been made as a prequel and it doesn't do the job well enough.