But right there I started with a mistake: The Thing is not really a remake, but a poorly conceived prequel to
John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic The
Thing. (Before I go any further, yes, that Thing was a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 film The Thing From Another World, which was itself based on the book Who Goes There? by John Campbell Jr. — these things are going to get
confusing.)
If you recall, at the beginning of Carpenter’s Thing, out in the endless snow of Antarctica we briefly meet some Norwegian scientists
trying to kill the Thing, which had morphed into the form of a sled dog. The
Norwegians make some poor decisions and ultimately die from grenade clumsiness
and a rather unfortunate linguistic misunderstanding, in that order. Then the
story quickly focuses on the Americans, including Kurt Russell and Keith David,
who are later stranded in the slowest game of metaphorical chess ever
conceived, a game we can assume is still going on down there on that cold
Antarctic plane.
This Thing goes back in
time about a week from the onset of the earlier movie. We meet some scientists,
they discover something creepy, and then they dig it up, though they mindlessly
forget to duplicate the famous shot of all the scientists standing in a circle
over the frozen ice containing the flying saucer that stranded the Thing on
Earth. For heaven’s sake, it was even in the earlier film; we watched a
videotape of these characters actually doing it. This clumsy overlooked detail
illustrates this film’s many failed prequel-original mergers.
Amid all these grisled Norwegians, with their ale-soaked beards
and kind spirits, is someone more foreign than the alien thing: a young America
Anyway, the Thing escapes from the ice — I wish I could teach meat to unthaw that way — and begins to
systematically devour and clone all the scientists. The only way to tell if
they’re the Thing or the real person is to check for crowns, fillings or metal
plates on bones because the Thing can’t digest inorganic material. “You’re going to
kill me because I floss,” one character complains when everyone thinks he’s the Thing. This scene looks an awful lot like the Kurt Russell scene from the
original, when he meticulously drew blood and scorched Petri dishes with a hot
wire. The Thing couldn’t be killed then because of a malfunctioning
flamethrower, which is exactly what happens here. Funny thing, flamethrowers.
Eventually it’s revealed that the Thing is in several people at
once, which leads me to almost call them Thing 1 and Thing 2, with many
apologies to Dr. Seuss, but I will refrain. As the alien Thing starts to infect
more and more people this is where the internal logic of this new Thing goes haywire. In the original, it
was revealed that a person would burst out of their clothes when absorbed by
the monster. But here characters are absorbed by the Thing in minutes only to
return to the film wearing the same clothes. Hey, screenwriters: We’ve already
been taught that this can’t be possible because the first film was meticulous
about this detail.
The actual Thing, is a hodge podge of grotesquery and gooeyness
that is more often a digital effect than a physical one. Carpenter’s Thing was
puppets, animatronics, matting and plate effects, stop-motion animation and
many other physical devices; today the film is still terrifying and gruesome.
This film though looks like it was created under harsh florescent lighting in a
server farm by people who have never once put red dye in corn syrup.
In the end, all you’ll care about this Thing is how it interacts with Carpenter’s Thing. The answer: very little. To make the connection between the
two pictures this film needed a helicopter, a dog, two Norwegians and some hand
grenades. It ends with none of them, as if director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.
forgot he was making a prequel. Only in the end credits due the pieces start to
line up, and hastily so.
And no, there’s not a Kurt Russell cameo. That’s one thing you
can stop looking forward to, though I can always suggest another thing.
