Film Review: The Thing
Olly Mann thinks this is a film that will satify the fans of the 80s original and attract a new younger following.
2 Dec 2011, 11:27
Are you excited?
Actually, there are no mega moviestars in Matthijs van Heijningen Jr's new version of John Carpenter's 1982 classic (itself a remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World), but that's all to the good, as it's that little bit tougher for the viewer to predict whom will be the next victim. This isn't a straight remake, either; it's a prequel, telling the story of The Thing's first attack - the one that caused the destruction at the Norweigan base camp uncovered by Kurt Russell's team in the last film. This strikes me as a very savvy way to simultaneously satisfy fans of the 80's version and 21st century teens. If you ever wanted to know exactly HOW that ice pick ended up embedded in the wall of that laboratory, you're about to find out; but if you've never seen the cult classic, it doesn't matter a jot, since this storyline precedes it, and is pretty straightforward to grasp: alien crash-lands, is uncovered by scientists, replicates their bodies, takes its revenge
All the pressure-cooker panic of Carpenter's film is present and correct, as is the literally chilling setting of a remote Arctic outpost, replete with inappropriately jolly-looking yellow snowmobiles. The psychological twists of John W. Campbell Jr's original sci-fi novella are here, too, as the audience analyze each character's actions, speculating which of them is not themselves at all, but rather an alien replication. If you were being pretentious, you could see it as an allegory about political leanings, or sexuality, or the danger of difference in the environs of mob mentality. I prefer to think of it as a story about people abducted by an extra-terrestrial muthafucker.
So I was happy to see there's a lot more bodyhorror, a lot more alien, a lot more squelching and splurging and explosions, than there are in Carpenter's film. A lot more Things popping out of boxes and from behind curtains and from out of the darkness, all accompanied by screeching musical stabs, and - though it's almost sacrilegious to say it – I think, therefore, that it's the most watchable Thing movie yet. Rather like Zack Snyder's 2004 re-imagining of Dawn of the Dead, van Heijningen's film is certainly less artful than its raw and anomalous predecessor, but functions far better as Saturday night popcorn fare. How you feel about that will probably depend on how seriously you take the genre. It certainly entertained me.
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I must admit that I'm glad they haven't been allowed to do a straight remake of the Carpenter film. His version still makes you jump even though you know the scary bits are coming along. Who would ever think that a petrie dish could be so scary!
There is another interesting aspect to this new film though, while many films have had accompanying computer games made to tie into the franchise this one has gone down a slightly different route. It has set up a whole playing environement on an already established MMORPG planet within Entropia Universe, a no subscription MMORPG, where you can go to hunt the creatures and also do some other quests to win real props from the original movie.
I must admit i'm not entirely sure that a full on gorefest is as much fun as a shocker along the lines of the Carpenter film but i'm willing to give it a try.
02/12/2011 17:18