October Edition #18: THE THING (2011)

Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.
Screenplay: Eric Heisserer, from the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr.
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Eric Christian Olsen
Release Date: 2011


Set in Antarctica, winter of 1982, several days before the events of John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982), this prequel tells the story of just what went down at the Norwegian camp that discovered the ship containing the titular creature that eventually makes its way to the turf of Kurt Russell and company. It follows a young graduate student named Kate Lloyd (Winstead), who joins the Norwegian scientific team that has just uncovered an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its occupant buried in the ice. Though the creature at first appears dead, it soon springs to life and goes on a rampage. The alien organism is capable of creating perfect replicas of any living being it comes into contact with, causing an epidemic of paranoia to spread throughout the camp. No one knows who to trust and the ultimate question becomes who’s human, and who’s a Thing? The group of scientists is slowly picked off in gruesome fashion , building up to a climax that leads directly into the very first scene of the 1982 film.

This movie could have used a Wampa attack to spice things up.

John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982) has a permanent spot in my top five favorite films ever made. Do not mistake my praise for hyperbole. It is one of my desert island movies, a movie I have watched, discussed and dissected more than any other I can think of. It helps that the film holds up to such scrutiny, weaving a hypnotically apocalyptic tale of fear and mistrust in the face of an implacable enemy, a mystery whose stubbornly ambiguous nature has left fans debating who was and who wasn’t really human for nearly thirty years. There is not a single wasted moment in that film, as every single scene and detail is in direct service to the story of twelve men in a desperate situation forced to choose sides in a situation in which no one can be trusted. In terms of casting, cinematography, special effects, and the sheer balls of Carpenter in establishing a mood of oppressive despair and seeing it all the way to its’ bitter end, it is a perfect movie.

After a thorough autopsy and hours of  research, we feel safe in concluding that this shit is, indeed, nasty.

I say all of this only so that you will know where I’m coming from going into this prequel. While THE THING itself is a remake of 1956’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, Carpenter’s film took the material and made it his own, churning out what is considered by most to be the best remake ever made. THE THING (1982) did not need to be remade, but if the powers that be at Universal had to make another movie based on the property, then the idea of doing a prequel seemed like the lesser of two evils. While I kept my hopes significantly lowered, they were slightly bolstered by the involvement of the production team behind the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake from 2004, probably the only film from the recent spate of horror remakes to stand apart from the original as a film that was at all worth a damn. So I went into this not expecting classic, but at least a decent companion piece to John Carpenter’s film. What I got was one of the most frustrating movies I have seen in quite some time. Let me start with what worked.

Talk about a splitting headache!

The production design of the Antarctic base perfectly matches John Lloyd’s work on the original, all long hallways and tight, claustrophobic quarters. Certain sets from the Carpenter film are recreated in exacting detail, in particular the room containing the block of ice in which the creature is frozen. The design of the creature itself is directly in line with special effects designer Rob Bottin’s conception of the Thing as an amorphous, ever-changing mass of tentacles, spider-legs and totally alien appendages from whatever other unspeakable life forms it has absorbed in its trip across the galaxy. When the Thing finally drops whatever human facade it has been wearing and finally decides to “Thing”-out, the imagery on display is truly inhuman and utterly horrific.

And that’s about it, folks. Everything else in this movie falls completely flat as a pale imitation of John Carpenter’s masterpiece. Some might claim that I’m not being fair by drawing such comparisons between the two films, but when a movie invites such comparisons in the way that THE THING (2011) does, the filmmakers are literally begging to be duly criticized. For starters, while everybody in the cast performs their roles adequately, none of the characters are distinguishable aside from the American leads. The story is robbed of any and all tension, as it is difficult to care about who is or isn’t a Thing when it is virtually impossible to tell any of the Norwegian characters apart. A significant part of this problem is the fact that, this being set in Antarctica, everybody but the women are covered in thick beards and similarly-colored parkas. This was also an issue in the original film, but the difference is that Carpenter allowed ample time for his characters to gradually breathe and come into their own. They might not have been the most well-drawn characters ever, but you at least knew who each one of them was. Here we get to choose between “Guy With Large, Bushy Beard”, and “Guy With Larger, But Less Bushy Beard.”

Another area in which the film falters is the gradual building of tension present in the ’82 film. There is a good twenty minute stretch in the middle of this movie where the characters start to lose it, and so devise a method of detecting who is and isn’t an alien by checking each others’ mouths for fillings, as apparently the monster is unable to replicate inorganic material. In theory this is an interesting spin on the blood test scene in Carpenters’ movie, and while I did feel slightly uneasy each time Kate shone her flashlight into someone’s mouth, it was nothing compared to the white-knuckle terror I felt during my first viewing of the blood test scene, which still retains its ability to startle on repeat viewings. None of this is helped by the fact that Ennio Morricone’s mesmerizing, creeptastic synth-based musical score has been replaced by orchestral cues from Marco Beltrami, master of the blandly ineffective horror movie soundtrack.

This scene reveals the origin of  the "Split-face" thing found by MacReady and Dr. Copper in the 1982 film.

As amazing a film as the ’82 version is in terms of story, what most people remember about it is the amazingly detailed and creative special effects used to bring the creature to life. While I must admit that the work done by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. does a fairly decent job of paying homage to the work of Rob Bottin, none of it retains the reality and sense of sheer creativity the pervaded the creature designs in the original films. Where Carpenter’s Thing was brought to life via some incredible puppetry, lighting and camera trickery, THE THING (2011) relies solely on CGI for its nightmarish visuals, and while it might be decent CGI, there’s something to be said for the fact that Bottin’s rubber creations still retain their realism 30 years later. The effects crew lack the demented imagination of Bottin, as there is nothing in this film that rivals the “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding!” awesomeness of the defibrillator scene or the spider head, though I will admit it was cool seeing the origin of the split-face monstrosity that MacReady brings back from the Norwegian camp in the ‘82 film.

The actors get finally got fed up and decided to torch this lazy fucking screenplay.

By the time we get to the film’s climax aboard the alien spaceship, my brain had pretty much checked out. At a certain point it became apparent that screenwriter Eric Heisserer had given up on telling a compelling story, content with simply allowing the final confrontation to descend into endless scenes of the remaining characters roaming the ship’s corridors shouting each others names over and over again, an unfortunate bit of laziness that I’ve noticed in most horror movies released in the last decade. There is a nice, ballsy last minute revelation that I didn’t see coming and appreciated for its mean-spirited bleakness that falls directly in line with Carpenter’s vision, but then the filmmakers completely puss out by allowing a character survive. Though we never do find out what happens to this character, or how they plan on making it back to the mainland, it still allows for a glimmer of hope, a quality that is not at all welcome in a prequel to possibly the grimmest horror movie ever made.

About that prequel business. It seems apparent to me that the makers of this film and the executives at Universal Studios were operating on two completely divergent wavelengths. The production team obviously wanted to make a respectful prequel to Carpenter’s movie, while the studio wanted a full-fledged remake. All of this is obvious from the marketing, to the awkward title (if it’s a prequel, why does it have the same title?), all the way through to certain images and scenes lifted directly from the original. But no studio has the guts to make the movie that Carpenter did back in ‘82, so what we’ve got is a severely neutered “Greatest Hits” version of the original film that only attempts to live up to the prequel moniker in a half-assed sequence that plays out over the end credits. You can almost hear the director crossing off a checklist of things he needs to address in this lazy sequence in order to link his movie up with Carpenter’s. It doesn’t work, as the audience I saw it with was confused and pissed off by what they were seeing. If you’re a fan of the original film it doesn’t work because none of the footage matches up, and if you’ve never seen the original it is completely meaningless, so the whole sequence works for nobody and is a shitty way to send people from the theater. Never mind the fact that the link to the original film has already been completely blown earlier in the film via a massive plot hole involving the details of the discovery of the spacecraft that in no way match up with information dropped on us in the ‘82 film, a detail so glaring I refuse to believe Heijningen and Heisserer didn’t spot it in the script stage, given their devotion to explaining insignificant details like how an axe wound up stuck in a door. Whoop-de-fucking doo!

None of this is to say that the movie is terrible. I’d say there is a good thirty minutes in the second act that held my interest, and the effects sequences are a lot of fun. I saw it with some friends, one of whom wouldn’t stop shielding her eyes from the screen out of pure terror so the movie obviously will work for some people. And as much as I’ve bitched, I did enjoy revisiting the world of Carpenter’s film again. Monster movies have fallen completely out of fashion in the last twenty years, so it was fun to see at least a decent one on the big screen again. The problem is that as a film that proudly wears the legacy of THE THING (1982) on it’s sleeve, this needed to be more than just decent. All of the ingredients for a great movie are there, but the filmmakers either didn’t take the care to see it through to fruition or, more likely, weren’t allowed to by a studio mindlessly catering to a mainstream audience. It could also have something to do with the fact that a great movie was already made from those same ingredients, and it was called John Carpenter’s THE THING.

My Rating:
5.5/10