Movie Review: The Thing

You know, there was definitely room for a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 seminal horror masterpiece, The Thing, which is still one of the absolutely most terrifying and riveting horror films I’ve ever seen.  Fleshing out the events of the ill-fated Norwegian Thule post, an hour away from Outpost 31, and where Kurt Russell’s MacReady and Richard Dysart’s Dr. Copper found the beginnings of the monster they didn’t yet know existed, but with what they would all too soon become acquainted, presented a viable follow up concept to Carpenter’s classic.  Who was the poor bastard who killed himself in his chair?  We know that the Norwegians dug the monster out of the ice and it escaped, but exactly how did it happen?  Maybe we’d find out a little more about Lars, the single-minded Nord who didn’t care who got in his way as long as he killed that seemingly innocuous dog at the beginning of the original.  And who was the two-faced (literally) melted slob that kicked off the shenanigans from a different front at Outpost 31?  I honestly wanted to know these things, as long as this Thing was done even half as smartly as Carpenter’s Thing.  But of course it wasn’t.

Set aside the groundbreaking and terrifying practical creature effects of Rob Bottin, which not only hold up some 30 years later, but usually surpass a lot of the CGI dreck with which we get saddled nowadays, for a moment.  What was the hallmark of of Carpenter’s classic?  Undeniably: dread, paranoia and mystery; and a decidedly slow burn to the developments, even when the Thing was known to be among the humans.  Throw in a motley cast of hardy American characters with enough subtlety to make them interesting, as well as a crafty and inventive monster, and you have your formula.  But alas, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s film can manage not a one of these.  The cast is populated by background actors that hide behind Nordic beards to the tune of virtual anonymity, and the front line players are so poorly developed as to be little better.

It takes some doing to make Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton and especially Adewale Akkinouye-Agbaje uninteresting.  And the same for Eric Christian Olsen, an actor whose work I like on NCIS: Los Angeles.  Alas, Winstead’s Kate Lloyd is little more than an exposition device, Edgerton’s Sam Carter is a pale and wholly bland shadow of MacReady, and Adewale?  Well, simply put, he’s criminally underused.  Criminally.  Olsen actually gets some of the better character moments as research assitstant, Adam Goodman, brief as they are.  The only other memorable character is Ulrich Thomsen’s asshole scientist, Dr. Sander Halversen, the head of the Norwegian recovery project.  Memorable that is to say, I could pick him out from the rest.  There’s also a Norwegian female scientist, Juliette (Kim Bubbs).  I spotted her cause she had no beard…and boobs.  The rest, lots of luck keeping track.

Since the story is more or less essentially already known, The Thing wastes little time getting on with it.  The Thing and its ship are discovered in the ice after a 100,000-year nap and paleontologist, Kate Lloyd, is recruited by Halversen and Adam to help with the specimen recovery.  Against her better judgment, Kate assists Halversen with getting a tissue sample.  But it’s not long before the Thing erupts from the block of ice in which it’s entombed, and sets about to snacking and copying the humans at the base.  The hunt is then on to kill it, even though it seems to snatch more than one of the crewmembers at a moment’s notice in secret.

A Norwegian is the first victim, and after the Thing is torched out in the open while trying to absorb him, the remains are analyzed and Kate deciphers its M.O.  She also deduces that as it’s copying a person, it can’t replicate inorganic materials such as teeth fillings.  That will become an important fact that will serve to substitute for the single most intense scene in Carpenter’s original later on down the line.  When Kate makes this discovery, as well as a bloody shower, she flags down the departing helicopter, which is when the Thing aboard strikes next.  Of course, though, since the trailers have shown one of the characters who is on the helicopter changing just a wee bit, that surprise is already shot.

Getting back to that teeth fillings issue, that aforementioned pivotal scene in the original, where MacReady concocts a way to draw a Thing out in the open with the petrie dishes of blood, is replicated here, only with virtually zero of the fist-clenching suspense.  Likewise, the pursuit of the Thing in the second act is done with none of the suspense of the original.  The paranoia is there in part, but because you have little to no clue who any of the supporting players are, any relevance of who the Thing is and isn’t lost, aside from which horrible-looking amalgam it’s going to take when flushed out and then torched.  There then comes a point when both the Thing and The Thing say fuck it and bring the confrontation out in the open, with a familiar incarnation that goes traipsing through the camp waylaying anything before it.  There’s no perplexity to the waxing of a major character, just a rampaging monster getting some dinner.  Most of the time if you have a suspicion about who is a Thing, you’re not proven wrong.  And that’s just another place where where the film fails.

The ending is a weakly-realized excursion by the surviving humans into the Thing’s ship.  And there’s one scene where one of the characters is cornered in a crawlspace that the Thing can’t get to.  However, considering that the Thing is an amorphous lifeform, and has shown little difficulty squeezing into or simply smashing through barriers and cubby holes of all kinds, this particular sequence rings hollow.  The climax of entering the gigantic spaceship that’s buried in the ice rings of the X-Files: Fight the Future third act, yet again with little of the intensity.  While the Thing designs are inventive, particularly a certain two-headed incarnation, it’s not enough to make up for the script and character deficiencies and the entire film never manages to recapture any of the dramatic highlights of the original, though it makes several attempts to do so.  The details dovetail pretty well into what we already know occurs in the original; but the key things that make the original unforgettable: the dread, the anxiety, the sheer fear aren’t recaptured whatsoever.  So yes, there was some room for a worthy follow up to Carpenter’s film…and I guess there still is, because The Thing 2011 just didn’t get the job done.

4.0 out of 10