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John Carpenter’s The Thing has become one of the truly iconic horror movies and for good reason. Although a remake itself, it only sparsely resembles its originator, becoming instead so much more; not a film about a blood drinking extraterrestrial carrot but about shape shifters hiding among a closed group and picking them off, resulting in one of the most tense, bleak and uncomfortable films ever made. So how to remake this without earning the ire of fans? Make a prequel instead, telling almost exactly the same story as the Carpenter version.
The film thus focuses on the Norwegian base that first encountered the rather unpleasant alien and explains what happened before the 1982 film. Frankly, this is a thankless task as not only is their inevitable fate known to the audience, it also requires several rather awkward plot contrivances to get it working for mainstream moviegoers. So we end up with an American helicopter pilot (Joel Edgerton) and a scientist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) because apparently the public cannot possibly want to watch a film with Scandinavian protagonists and they thought that a young female lead might add to the box office. Unfortunately, it also means that the atmosphere does not feel anywhere near as isolated or bleak as it is not a closed group anymore. What makes this worse is that, although she is a perfectly fine actress, Mary Elizabeth Winstead cannot command the screen as Kurt Russell did and the film suffers considerably as a result.
The biggest problem though is that while the essential premise that, as the Carpenter version put it, ‘man is the warmest place to hide’ was done brilliantly in the original film, attempts at horror in the new movie feel like cheap knock versions in comparison. The transformations are strangely predictable so you know exactly when someone is about to get munched, and they fail to shock as a result. Meanwhile thanks to an overdependence on CGI, they have nowhere near as much physical heft and it’s easy to tell where man ends and monster begins as they look conspicuously out of place. Which makes what should be truly horrifying metamorphoses merely a chance to show off expensive CGI that may look impressive but doesn't work. The entire tone of the film fails to impress, as it’s hard to feel uncomfortable and paranoid about a monster that does not look quite right, so that personally I found James Arness’s big carrot of the 1951 original more intimidating then these state of the art creations.
In fairness, this version of The Thing always faced the seemingly insurmountable problem that in tying itself so closely to an established horror classic it couldn’t help but pale in comparison. To its credit, was this not the case it would have its good points, and compared to franchise continuations like Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake it’s a vast improvement. Yet in the end, this film fails to establish its own territory or impress. Man may still be the warmest place to hide, but this film leaves you cold.
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