Studio: Universal
Disc/Transfer Specifications: Anamorphic Widescreen; Region 1 (U.S.) Release Tested
Tested Audio Track: English Dolby Digital 5.1
IT’S NOT HUMAN. YET.
PLOT ANALYSIS:
Depending on the rumor channel you listened to or read online, the 2011 horror shocker sharing the same name with John Carpenter’s special effects-loaded legendary 1980’s remake was either a remake of
that remake, or a prequel story which was designed to answer many of the questions Carpenter’s gore fest presented about characters, the alien organism and where it originated and more. I am delighted to report that this version of
The Thing is indeed not a remake of Carpenter’s excellent film, but rather a genuine attempt at a prequel story – specifically, concentrating on the events that plagued the Norwegian science team who finds the alien before Kurt Russell and his U.S. science team are taken over by it in Carpenter’s version. This was the right avenue to take, I think, as we were always left wondering in the very beginning of Carpenter’s film where the Alaskan Husky came from (later discovering he was at the Norwegian camp), why the Norwegians were shooting at him and ultimately how they stumbled upon the alien in the first place. In Carpenter’s film – which of course was a remake of
The Thing From Another World, itself based on a novella called
Who Goes There? – we see the alien craft entering our atmosphere and crashing through the ozone layer and other protective planetary layers, supposedly landing in Antarctica, where it remains frozen for some hundreds of thousands of years. Picking up in the winter of 1982, Carpenter’s film goes on to assume someone else (the Norwegian scientists) have discovered the ship and alien life form inside of it, but then the events concentrate on the American outpost team that are overtaken by the organism one by one after it spreads from the infected dog from the Norwegian camp. As a
Thing fan, I was always left wondering exactly what went on at that Norwegian outpost before the U.S. team was infected.
And you know something? The filmmakers for this one got it kinda right – from the exact location sets such as the wooden shack and stairs that the block of ice with the alien in it is sitting in (seen in Carpenter’s version when Russell and the doctor arrive to haul the thing back) to the end sequence in which the last of the Norwegians are shooting at the dog trying to stop it from getting to the U.S outpost, setting up, perfectly, the beginning of Carpenter’s film. I was very impressed at the level of detail and thought that went into trying to make the two films connect and flow, as many prequels and spinoffs simply don’t do.
But, alas – as much as there was positive here, there was also negative. First of all, we have a no-name cast playing the Norwegian scientists, which is fine, but in the lead “American” role is Mary Elizabeth Winstead, portraying an American scientist called to the Norwegian camp to view the alien specimen they found in the ice; this just didn’t fit to me. Why does there always have to be a chick in these modern horror films or thriller pics? Carpenter’s version had a group of men in an isolated location in the barren Antarctic, and the sense of claustrophobia and paranoia amongst them just worked as-is…bringing a rogue female element into the mix for the sake of “appealing to modern audiences” or keeping in the vain of modern remakes and prequels is plain idiotic in my opinion. That lent to the second big problem of 2011’s
The Thing – the film’s plot takes place in the same time period as Carpenter’s film, circa 1982, and we are to assume the alien has absorbed the dog at the Norwegian camp, making its way to the American outpost in a frame of a few hours perhaps. But the problem is, this film didn’t
feel like anything remotely suggesting it was the 1980’s. I hate when filmmakers and studios do this. They’re so desperate to run a film into production and into theaters, they glaze over obvious points like this regardless of the fact that many will take notice – thus taking such viewers completely out of the experience. For 1982, the clothing is just wrong, the dialogue is wrong and the overall look and feel of the sets is off – you can see a complete attempt to copy Carpenter’s style of his film and the sets, such as the pans of the long hallways in the Norwegian camp, and we even have a variation of the spine-tingling heartbeat synth score which accompanied the 1982 version…but in general, I didn’t necessarily believe this was 1982 in the prequel.
Of course, we have the prerequisite “hot guy” with scraggly hair and facial growth, looking and dressing like no one from the 1980’s, and we have the kinda sexy Winstead in “modern” looking jeans and tops, speaking in a decidingly non-1980’s dialect, and the whole thing took me out of the story a few times. That isn’t to say the whole thing was terrible – to the contrary, many of the sequences smacked of Carpenter’s mood and environment created in his film, and in that way the two films definitely connected.
We also get a glimpse, in this prequel, of the alien craft up close and even of its interior – something not even attempted in Carpenter’s version. We always wanted to know what the ship looked like up close and inside, and we get a chance to do so here – there’s even a cool sequence involving the pulsating blue neon lights surrounding the craft (seen as its plummeting towards Earth in the title sequence of Carpenter’s version) as they turn on and circle the ship. The problem comes when the filmmakers took this “inside the ship” angle too far, making the film begin to feel like
Alien or any number of those sci fi spinoffs, and we’re suddenly left with this slimy alien organism chasing people aboard its crashed ship…something that felt totally out of place compared to Carpenter’s original premise. The concept was that this being hides inside a human host, absorbing him or her until it can copy it bit-for-bit; this idea was what made Carpenter’s version so downright unsettling, as the alien would break out of its human shell when feeling threatened, so we never really knew who was human until it was too shockingly late.
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