Though credited as an adaptation of the short story Who Goes There, which provided the basis for Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby’s 1951 film The Thing From Another World, this film, by Dutch commercials director and feature debutante Matthijs van Heijningen Jr, is actually a reasonably close remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 version of Hawks and Nyby’s film (confused yet?)
It’s not so much remake as premake, as this film sets itself immediately before Carpenter’s, as we see what happened at the Norwegian Antarctic outpost glimpsed in Carpenter’s film. The plot is simple; a team of Norwegian scientists find a crashed spaceship under 100,000 years of ice in Antarctica. Nearby they also find a huge creature. To help them extract the creature and investigate it they recruit young palaeontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). After its icy tomb begins to melt, the creature escapes, and it soon becomes clear that any of the scientists may in fact be THE THING!
The Thing 2011 is less awful than I expected it would be, that said, it’s still pretty awful much of the time. Winstead is miscast, it’s not that I don’t buy her intelligence, I’m sure she’s very smart the problem is that, at just 26 during shooting, she’s just too young. I don’t buy a group of older scientists going to someone who could only be, at most, a couple of years past her doctorate for a discovery of this magnitude, and the upshot is that – appealing and capable though she is – Winstead just doesn’t make sense here.
Maybe I’m thinking too hard though, I mean, it’s The Thing, it’s a monster movie, so let’s look at it on those terms. On those terms it starts not too shabbily. The monster’s escape is ludicrous and shows too much too soon, but after that the film has promising passages, with a few solid suspense pieces and one very decent, very gooey monster puppet for Winstead and Ulrich Thomsen to dissect in the moment that comes closest to matching Carpenter’s film for effects. Towards the end of act two comes the film’s best scene; a tense variation on Carpenter’s blood test sequence which feels intimate and threatening (it involves Winstead looking in characters mouths to see if they are potentially THE THING!) and divides the eight characters around in that moment neatly into opposed groups. This is when, if it ever could, the film had the chance to establish its own identity, but screenwriter Eric Heisserer and van Heijningen lack either the will or the skill. Unfortunately problems persist throughout the film, led by a predictable screenplay and telegraphed direction, which allows us to count in the scares (the monster escape scene suffers badly from this) and leaves us in little doubt as to who is about to explode in a sub par CGI mess of tentacles and yonic imagery.
The great failing of The Thing 2011 is that it looks worse – much, MUCH worse – than Carpenter’s 1982 version. In that film Rob Bottin, Stan Winston and their teams achieved practical animatronic effects that still amaze, repulse and terrify now, many are nodded to here, but not a single one is topped. The problem, as ever with CGI, is presence and texture. There is a weightless, putty like, feeling to the CGI here, it looks and feels like a collection of pixels rather than stretched, deformed, reformed, organic matter and for many of the scenes it is all too obvious that characters are reacting to nothing. The last 25 minutes of the film are just a succession of the same scene – Winstead and/or co-star Joel Edgerton (wasted in a nothing part) facing off against an unimpressive lump of pixels.
Logical questions abound (What happened to Lars? Why the holy living Hell does a scientific dig in Antarctica require a whole box of grenades? Why, after they are disabled, can snowcats be fixed in about 3.5 seconds?) but in the grand scheme of things these are minor annoyances, and the problem is that the big picture just doesn’t work, despite a couple of moments that promise more. Are there worse horror movies out now? Sure, but that’s hardly a recommendation when you could, for less than the cost of a ticket for this film, buy Carpenter’s film on a beautifully pristine Blu Ray. Do that instead.
