Reviews
Face The Thing That Should Not Be
One of these Things is not like the other...although it really wants to be
1. The Thing (2011) is pretty much a by-the-numbers prequel/rehash/whatever to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), so this review will be written by the numbers.
2. This whole review is one big spoiler.
3. This prequel is, like most, entirely unnecessary. It explains very little about the titular Thing, its origins, or its purpose that was not already explained in Carpenter’s movie. The prequel’s human characters are mostly forgettable. This movie’s purpose seems to be to kick-start a franchise at worst or to pay homage to John Carpenter at best.
4. This review is, like most, also entirely unnecessary. It too explains very little about the titular Thing, its origins, or its purpose. Difference: I won't make a profit off of this review.
5. Did I really expect this prequel to surpass Carpenter’s version? No. I can safely say that I didn’t. But I was curious enough to see this in the theater.
6. In 1982, there actually were some legitimate reasons besides nostalgia to remake movies like The Thing from Another World (1951). David Cronenberg also realized as much when he revamped 1958's The Fly for 1986. The differences between what could be shown in movies in the 50s and what could be shown in the 80s are vast, both in terms of technical capabilities and societal conventions, to name just two aspects. There has not been such a huge sea-change since then, and there may not be another for decades to come. Technology has progressed significantly since the 1980s, and it will continue to do so steadily, but that’s now a given, and seldom represents a major upheaval in the way films are made these days. But a movie like Carpenter’s The Thing would have been banned in 1951. It never would have been made, period. It never would have occurred to anyone to make such a movie back then.
7. If any movie is not getting made in 2011, it’s not because no one has dared consider the idea.
8. The makers of this prequel, released in 2011, seem to have desperately tried to retrofit their version to the particulars of a movie released in 1982. Carpenter was not trying to emulate much from 1951 with his version of The Thing. It was not a rote exercise in nostalgia. That’s really the crux of the matter right there. If Carpenter’s The Thing did not exist, we would need to invent it. Not so this prequel.
9. This 2011 movie titled The Thing clearly is being marketed as a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Therefore, it is pretty damn difficult to evaluate in any other context. Some people will claim that it should be gauged on its own merits. That is a ridiculous argument. Of course it should be juxtaposed with Carpenter’s version! The filmmakers obviously have taken great pains to keep it consistent with Carpenter’s version in storyline and in the “look” of the movie. I applaud them for acknowledging their source and trying to recreate the sets and the atmosphere so lovingly, but it was a losing proposition from the start. They were begging for comparisons, and so they were doomed to either piss off the Carpenter fans for not being faithful enough or piss off everyone else for not being original enough.
10. I didn’t hate this prequel. But that’s not nearly good enough. Is the best we can hope for from the cinema experience is that it’s “not terrible”? For the cost of a movie ticket these days, I’m counting on getting a bigger return than the dubious experience of “not hating” the movie.
11. Some of the visual effects are pretty cool, although they readily betray their CGI-ness. But really, isn’t the main reason most people will have any inclination to watch this prequel just to see what hideous new forms The Thing will assume? There’s really no other direction it could go, being a relatively mainstream action-horror movie. The very idea of a creature like The Thing is just cool. But in execution, it’s destined to be fodder for a hunt-and-chase movie. As the ever-devolving Alien franchise proved, an attempt to sustain the thrill of a single very-cool central concept generally results in variations of the same movie over and over again. I would have loved a nice, slow, hard science-fiction tale that really went into great detail about the whys and wherefores of The Thing’s existence, but that would never fly at the box office. All that aside, the prequel's CGI is not a patch on the practical effects of the 1982 movie.
12. There are precious few truly iconic horror-movie moments. It’s rare for any franchise to get more than one decent bite at the apple. Rehashers, take heed: The law of diminishing returns is not in your favor.
13. Moviemakers: Look, Carpenter did his thing (no pun intended) extremely well. Accept it. He was working in a time period when remakes could be done with somewhat more impunity and certainly with more aesthetic justification, and paradoxically he could also be more faithful to the source material (John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?) which couldn’t have been filmed convincingly even in 1951. The chances that the magic could be duplicated once more using the same film property in 2011 were practically nil. This whole reboot business is a tricky proposition from the get-go, but if that’s where you’re determined to venture, then put your time, money, and effort into resurrecting some other as-yet-unmined source material. There must be dozens of properties from bygone eras that could be explored in a new light. Find something that didn’t work well before, or that’s impossibly hokey in this day and age, and improve upon it, modify it so as to make it unrecognizable except in name only. Then you can operate in the same spirit as Carpenter did with The Thing and still create something halfway unique.
Posted by Todd Monkeypants on 10/25 • (1) Comments • Permalink
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#1 Posted by The Thing on October 26, 2011
I’m-a get you! RRRRAWWRRRR!!