What really made John Carpenter’s The Thing so magical was not its sci- fi elements, its alien movie aspects or even, I daresay, its splendid 1980s animatronic gore. It was the psychological tension! The issue of trust was a horrifying prospect: Who can you trust? Are you who you say you are? How can I tell what you say is the truth? At any moment, someone could be an alien waiting for the opportune moment to burst out and consume the vulnerable person. As a prequel to John Carpenter’s work, The Thing (2011) taps respectfully into this raw suspense from the start, but towards the end loses its direction and falls victim to the Hollywood clichés of a typical alien monster film.
The Thing prequel (for simplicity I’ll call the 1982 film “John Carpenter’s”) covers what happened in the Norwegian base. Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is recruited cautiously by Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) to aid in an Antarctic dig of a great scientific discovery: an alien specimen found frozen in the ice near its ship. With the help of Norwegian scientists, they recover the body to the safety of the base, but soon learn that it is still alive… and has the ability to assume the shape of that which it kills.
The first half of the story follows how John Carpenter’s film goes down almost exactly. (I won’t say anything about how it fares against 1951 The Thing from Another World… because I haven’t seen it.) After the alien has proved to infect several humans already, extreme paranoia and distrust breaks out among the surviving crew. Kate quickly assumes the Kurt Russell-type leader, herding the survivors into open areas and investigating methods of exposing the monster. Tensions run extremely high, as they did in John Carpenter’s, and at these moments I felt The Thing prequel had a good thing going for it. The suspense was thrilling and engaging, and aliens were bursting out of bodies at wholly unexpected times. The acting was consistently solid; Winstead did her part well, and the use of authentic Scandinavian actors was an added bonus. Within thirty minutes the film had paid enough homage to the original to be a worthy predecessor – more than I expected it to do in the first place — but then it decided to take its own stylistic turn, which most would consider to be fine but Carpenter fans not so much.
First, the age of animatronics is over. It’s realistic to expect the effects in every Hollywood movie these days to rely on CGI, The Thing (2011) being no exception. So while it lacked that creepy gooey tangible feel of John Carpenter’s animatronics, The Thing prequel had plenty of fast- paced alien sequences while still looking fairly good. The monster design stays pretty faithful, including wiry tentacles and frighteningly random mouths. Of course at this point though, these kind of CGI effects are nothing we haven’t seen before; many times it seemed to be a zombie-type monster rather than Carpenter’s amorphous alien, and in that sense was a bit unbelievable.
Second, the movie switched tone halfway from primarily a psychological thriller to an alien, sci-fi flick. Whilst in Carpenter’s film the alien tended only to burst out into its true form necessarily when discovered, in The Thing prequel it is glorified with an ungodly amount of screen time. The film quickly loses its intensity as it dwindles away into an ordinary monster chase around the Norwegian base.
By measures of any typical Hollywood monster horror film, The Thing is still an engaging and impressive ride. But trying to continue in the same spirit as John Carpenter’s, the film fails to sustain the classic psychological suspense it starts out with. 7.5/10
