The Thing (2011) Review

In 1931, an author by the name of John W. Campbell Jr. started a legacy of terror when he penned one of the most frightening short stories of all time, Who Goes There? Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, he told the tale of an Antarctic scientific research team that makes a disturbing discovery buried deep in the ice, and when they dig it up, they inadvertently release a nightmarish monster that is able to assimilate any life form and copy them perfectly. One by one, the members of the team are assimilated and transformed into Things, and it is up to assistant commander McReady to try and see the survivors through this terrifying ordeal. I read this story last summer when I had absolutely nothing else to do, and even with the Bahamas sun shining down on me, I could still feel the icy cold tension oozing from the pages. This short story has some very gripping suspense, and even with its short length, it was a disturbing, unnerving read.

Those hateful red eyes will haunt your dreams...

Then, in 1951, producer Howard Hawkes decided that Campbell's story needed to be adapted for the big screen, so what resulted was The Thing From Another World. Similar to the short story, a military research team finds a gruesome discovery in the arctic circle when they come across an alien craft, and its passenger frozen in the snow. What results is a nightmarish journey through hell. However, some creative liberties were taken with the monster in this film, so instead of having the beast assimilate crew members and copying them, we have a vampiric vegetable monster who has taken some acting lessons from Frankenstein's Monster. While this was a huge deviation from Who Goes There? in terms of plot, it was still a good movie with some subtle humor and some intense encounters with the monster, and is a must-have for 50's B-movie buffs. However, audiences still did not get to see a faithful adaptation to Campbell's gruesome tale until a particular filmmaker by the name of John Carpenter gave the world nightmares for decades when, in 1982, John Carpenter's The Thing was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences!

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my favorite movies of all time, and it is a definitive horror classic! It is an extremely faithful adaptation of the original short story, and it tells the story of the scientific research team and their gruesome, deadly discovery in the ice after they are seemingly attacked by a mad Norwegian. The Norwegian was shooting at a dog who was running towards their base, and he was shot dead when he appeared to assault the team. When they investigated the ruins of the Norwegian camp where the crazed gunman came from, they find a horrible, twisted monster in the ice. Before they know it, the Thing begins assimilating the men, one by one. The first time I saw The Thing was about three years ago, and after I saw the infamous kennel scene, I was kept up all night because I was afraid that my dog would transform into a hideous, indescribable jumble of maws, tentacles, and slime. Unlike Hawkes's movie from 1951, Carpenter's monster is more indescribable, more Lovecraftian, and far more disturbing that anything anyone had witnessed before 1982, and while the movie did not do so well in the box office (due to the fact that a much friendlier alien, E.T., was a competitor), John Carpenter's The Thing is regarded as one of the most depressing and frightening movies ever. There is so much tension between the crew members that you can cut it with a knife, and you really have no idea who is human, and who is a monster. The special effects were also amazing, and you can find clips on youtube of some of the monster scenes if you want to spoil the movie for yourselves. Trust me, horror fans, this one is worth it...

Fast forward nearly two decades later when fan speculated that there were plans to remake The Thing. Many long-time Thing Enthusiasts were not that happy to hear the news, especially with the recent slew of mediocre or terrible sequels, remakes, and prequels of old movies that just don't wow anybody's expectations, and with the advent of CG as the dominant tool for special effects, a lot of fans thought that The Thing would be ruined forever. Fast forward to 2011, where a prequel to Carpenter's classic has just been released in theatres. Is it nearly as good as its predecessors, or will it be the black sheep of the franchise?

When I walked into the theater with my girlfriend to watch this movie, I had several fears in mind:

a) Since it is a prequel of an existing license, what could have happened was that it could have been completely unnecessary, the plot, characters, and setting holding very little relevance with the previous movie. This happened with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, where the only thing that the movie had going for it was the gratuitous amount of violence, and Leatherface. Other than that, it was completely unnecessary, and there was no reason for it to be made other than for money.

b) Since the filmmakers behind the scenes knew what made the original The Thing scary, they could have completely rehashed Carpenter's film - they could have included a kennel scene, they could have included a blood test, and they could have included a doctor character like Blair who would go crazy and be locked in a shack. A popular example of this is not a prequel, but a remake - Psycho, from the 1990's. This was a complete waste of celluloid because what they did was copy Hitchcock's film frame-for-frame, so there was no reason for it to exist. Why not watch the original Psycho? Again, why was that necessary?

See, something that is absolutely essential when you are making a sequel or prequel is that you need to have a good balance between the extremes of making a movie that just copies everything from another film, or making a movie that has nothing to do with its predecessor. Basically, you need to make a movie that has some familiar elements while doing something new and fresh. So where does The Thing (2011) fall into this scheme of things? Well, while I didn't have my expectations set terribly high, I was actually amazed at how much things the movie did right. See, when director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. set out to make a prequel to John Carpenter's masterpiece, he did not just copy and paste scenes from the previous movie that would have made fans nostalgic and call it a day. Instead, he must have paid really close attention to detail when he watched the 1982 The Thing because he blew my mind with how well he connected the two films together. See, remember the scene where McReady and crew investigated the Norwegian base and found numerous scenes of absolute horror before discovering a twisted, horrible creature frozen in the ice? The prequel takes place in this very same base, and it plays out what happened to the Norwegians before John Carpenter's movie began.

McReady finding the empty ice block in the Norwegian base (John Carpenter's The Thing (1982))

Before I continue anything else, I might as well provide a recap of the story, right? Basically, the Norwegians accidentally discover something amazing buried in the Antarctic waste: a giant alien spacecraft beneath the ice. They also discover the frozen corpse of its pilot. When word gets out, they bring in graduate student Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Dr. Sander Halvorson (Joel Edgerton) to examine the corpse. However, the creature is soon set loose from the ice, and the crew is slowly but surely assimilated by the creature. What delights me the most about the story was handled was how they didn't just have it take place in the Norwegian camp, but the writers also paid extremely good attention to detail in how they executed the plot as it unfolded. You actually care for the plight of these characters, and while you got a vibe on how things went down in Carpenter's movie, the prequel actually makes this scene more powerful because it tells you a story that makes you connect with the people who died while confronting The Thing. For example, at the very beginning of John Carpenter's The Thing, when the crazy Norwegian is chasing the dog through the tundra while shooting at it? The viewer is given some context for why that was happening in the prequel, and the character is actually fleshed out - he is given a name, a history, and a role to play so that people can feel more connected to him in Carpenter's movie. What my girlfriend did was watch all three of the Thing films in one weekend, and after watching the prequel, we went and watched the 1982 The Thing. Throughout the introductory sequence, we were both rooting for Lars, and felt horrible when the Americans shot him in the head when he tried to warn them about the dog's true nature.

OH FUCK

However, something really cool about how the prequel tied the movies together is the attention to detail in the events that took place in the movie - when MacReady and company investigate the Norwegian base, they find a giant hollow block of ice, an axe buried in the wall, most of the building burnt down, a man who had slit his wrists and throat while sitting at the communications radio and finally the two-faced monster buried in the snow, among other details. Well guess what? The prequel actually shows the significance of each and every one of those findings. Throughout the movie, these events take place when the crew members decide who is human and who isn't, and it does not feel like the filmmakers are just going "HEY! REMEMBER THIS FROM THE PREVIOUS MOVIE?! HUH?!" Everything has a specific purpose in the plot, and The Thing (2011) wants you to feel like you are watching a part of Carpenter's story that was never told. I'm dead serious, too. I don't want to give away how the movie ends, but when I said it ends where its predecessor begins, I mean it - Lars even enters the chopper and starts chasing the dog across the tundra, firing away with his sniper rifle as the haunting and desolate theme from the introduction to John Carpenter's The Thing starts to play in the background. It really sent chills down my spine, and it shows that these guys really care about The Thing as a story.

The Thing that appears in both movies

As I said earlier, CG effects have dominated the industry as the main way to make movie magic, and when fans heard that The Thing was going to be remade, many of them were worried about the monsters looking like ass compared to Rob Bottin and Stan Winston's horrific creations. After I saw the movie, I can confirm two things: a) they used both traditional and CG effects to make the monsters, and b) the monsters didn't look like crap. See, something we should take into consideration about the special effects from John Carpenter's movie was that while they were really disgusting and awesome to behold, they weren't very mobile, so the greatest extent to which they could move about was just sitting in place, with the exception of the Thing whose head splits in half during the blood test scene. Something good about CG is that it can let the monsters be a lot more active, and a lot more of a threat when they come out from their human disguises. I think this is a strength for the movie because the scenes where the monster shows up aren't limited to just "Monster appears! Monster freaks people out! Monster gets torched!" CG effects also benefited the movie because it made the monster very disturbing when it started to 'thing out.' While Carpenter was also able to pull this off in his movie, The Thing (2011) was more disturbing because CG is at a point where you can take a real person and make it look like the person is actually morphing into this horrible creature from space right before your eyes. Imagine if a normal guy could be sitting right next to you, and then suddenly his face actually splits open. This is how effectively the CG was utilized in terms of bringing the monster to life.

Yeah, that weird-looking dude behind you is not who he says he is.

Even though I really enjoyed the prequel, there were some things that bothered me. It doesn't hurt the movie overall - I still really recommend it - but there were some things that didn't need to be there. For example, there is a scene much later in the movie when they come across the Thing's spaceship underneath the ice. I wouldn't have minded too much if this was kept brief, but for a moment the movie's tone goes from an uncomfortable nightmare with science fiction elements to a straight-up sci-fi. This is when the main characters enter the ship and start looking around for the monster, and when they see the interior of the ship, I was thinking back to the alien ship in Cowboys vs. Aliens. While I think they could have cut this entire scene out from the movie, what I think happened was that the audiences needed something pretty to look at, since it was an effects-heavy movie. You know the trend in modern Hollywood films nowadays, there has to be a scene that shows off a pretty, otherworldly environment in detail so that the audience can be awed by the special effects. I don't blame the filmmakers for this, as thankfully the tone shifts right back to horror with science fiction elements as soon as the space ship scene ends. Something that also bugged me was that a lot of the scares when the Thing showed up were mainly due to unbearably loud noises it made, startling my girlfriend and completely making me deaf in one ear. Again, this can be attributed to an evolution in how movie audiences are scared, loud noises being the scary thing for modern American audiences. However, I don't think that the movie itself is to blame for the loudness of the monster noises, as I think the theatre speakers were too damn loud! My suggestion if you see this film: bring some ear plugs. You will still hear the movie. Trust me.

All in all, The Thing (2011) is a very worthy successor to John Carpenter's The Thing. Is it as good as the 1982 classic? No, but it's pretty damn close! Fans of the original film should really give this a chance because the attention to detail, the tension, and the obvious love for Carpenter's classic makes this prequel outshine any other contrived, uninspired horror reboot by a mile! I highly recommend The Thing (2011), so get out there and scare yourself silly!