The short story "Who Goes There?" by John Campbell Jr. was first published in 1938. It was made into the Howard Hawks film The Thing From Another World in 1951, which was subsequently remade in 1982.
The 1982 version, simply titled The Thing (1982), was directed by John Carpenter and stuck much closer to the original short story than Hawks' film did. In Carpenter's film, a group of American researchers find a destroyed Norwegian research camp and bring back what they think is a dead alien for study. It turns out it's not dead, and it begins copying and replacing the members of the team.
Blah blah blah, it's a masterpiece.
The Thing (2011) is a prequel -- and supposedly not a remake -- to Carpenter's film. It does its best to answer: what the hell happened at that Norwegian base?
The answer is: pretty much the same thing that went on at the American base. But with some differences.
Prequels are, I maintain, a bad idea at best. They seek to answer questions nobody was asking. The best that they can do is come up with a compelling answer to a boring question.
And, for the most part, I think The Thing (2011) does that.
While this film doesn't add much of anything to the Thing mythos, it's a well-told tale and a pretty scary monster movie to boot. I actually saw just as many nods to Alien (1979) as I did The Thing (1982).
You can fill in the plot yourself: a team of Norwegian scientists (with some Americans and one Brit peppered in for good measure) uncover an alien in the Antarctic ice. It thaws out, goes on a rampage, and begins copying and replacing members of the team. It's up to protagonist Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to either survive or die trying.
Some of the scenes in this film are unbelievably tense. When Kate figures out that the alien can't copy inorganic material, she decides that checking everyone for fillings is a good way to single out who might and might not be an alien. She checks all eight members of the team, down the line, one by one, with a flashlight.
At this point in the movie, we've already seen horrible clawed tentacles shoot out of an infected person's face, and so waiting to see if this happens as our perfectly likeable protagonist gazes into their mouths is an exercise in agony for the audience, but in a good way.
This is a horror movie, after all.
There is a fair bit of nonsense scattered throughout the film, especially of the scientific sort.
One particularly egregious example of dumb science is when Kate gazes into a microscope to observe the alien cells interacting with human tissue. The alien cells move about, copying and replacing the human cells, which is a fine bit of visual exposition (albeit plagiarized straight from the original film), but then someone in the sound mixing lab went ahead and added sound effects to the shot.
Microscope slides do not have sound-effects!
Most of the film's nonsense is clustered toward the beginning, and I noted with much glee that the film improved considerably as time went on. This is something most horror films -- heck, most films in general -- fail to get right. The excitement is supposed to build.
So the film stumbles as it sets up some of the scares, but the scares themselves are pretty good.
A lot of reviewers took a disliking to the film's CGI effects. I thought CGI was the right choice when the monster was still, or morphing out of cover, but it was the wrong choice during action scenes. Likewise, I think the moving animatronics of the original film look far worse than the stationary ones, so I'm not about to knock this film.
That's just the way effects are.
In the end, I think The Thing was about as unnecessary as any prequel, but at least it was competently-shot, well-plotted (for the most part), and scary.
Gone are any of the social and political allegories of Carpenter's original, so we're still talking about just a decent horror movie, and not a masterpiece, but in a market as saturated as ours with dumb horror, it's nice to see a decent one come along every now and then.
--Serge
a) what kind of sound effects did they give microscope slides? Anything other than glass clinking. Or are you saying you could hear the cells moving about? Because that would be so stupid, it wouldn't make sense. I'm sure all those guys working on the project had to take some generic biology class, where they hated labs because they were so boring.
ReplyDeleteb) In the porn version, I bet they check for inorganic material in other places. But what would the movie be called? How you can you give a porno name to something called "The Thing"? It's as porno as you can get.
The added effect was indeed a slurping sound every time an alien cell took over a human one.
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