*WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!*
As normal tradition with every year from the film industry, we’re treated to an unnecessary horror remake that didn’t need to be remade in the first place (I’m looking at you Michael Bay and your production company, Platinum Dunes!). So it would’ve been sooner or later that John Carpenter’s 1982 cult-classic, The Thing, would be up for grabs! The film was a remake to The Thing From Another World (1951), which itself was an adaptation of the 1938 short story, Who Goes There?. 2011’s The Thing, is a prequel set before the events of the 1982 film and shows us exactly what happened at the Norwegian base in Antarctica. Though the idea of seeing the events unfold isn’t something fans were desperately demanding to see and we can already establish what will happen without having to guess. So it comes to great shame that this version of The Thing is nothing more than a continuation of the unnecessary horror remake/prequel line.
The film starts out three members of the Norwegian team discovering the alien spaceship that was featured briefly in the first film. Then they recruit an American paleontologist, Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), ask her to come to the alien crash site in Antarctica and to study the specimen they also discovered. They bring back the frozen alien life form back to the base, though it eventually escapes. Causing chaos and destruction, whilst Kate finds out the creature can imitate other beings (in this case, other people) and therefore one of their team members could potentially be the alien.
The film obviously shows the filmmakers does not understand what made the original movie brilliant; it wasn’t about the monster but the horror was atmospheric. The pacing was slow but that’s what brought the suspense and tension, making you play detective on guessing who’s not human and who is. This film is more interested on killing each human character we barely got to know as quickly as possible, leaving our two heroes; Kate Lloyd, who is just a rip-off of Ellen Ripley from the Alien series. Braxton “Sam” Carter (played by Joel Edgerton) is a carbon copy of R.J. MacReady (played famously by Kurt Russell) but less charismatic and interesting. The characters in the first film had individual traits, which made them identifiable and somewhat likable that made you care what happens to them. The characters in this film get barely anything to work with and you could care less which one gets infected and dies.
The story is an exact copy of the original film, done maybe in different order but essentially a remake by the word. It also features quite a few plot-holes and stupid decisions from the filmmakers; if the ship worked all this time, why didn’t the alien just go and leave? If there was a Russian base mentioned at the end of the film, why didn’t the American base know about it in the original film? The film was written by Eric Heisserer, who also co-wrote the equally unnecessary horror remake, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). This is Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s feature film debut, as he only previously made a video and a short film (according to his IMDb page). He resorts to the horror clichés on having jump scares, mistaking it for creating scares when it doesn’t (and it gets really tiresome very quickly). The suspense and paranoia that was featured in the original is gone and it is just simply a generic monster film where it is survival for the fittest.
The visual effects in this film look terrible, and this is over reliance on CGI. The effects in the original film, done by legendary make-up maestro Rob Bottin, are much more affective because they’re practical and are more believable than seeing monsters done by computers. Though worst of all, seeing more of the creature is hard to suspend your disbelief and makes it less scary. The creature in the original was only shown with close-ups and viewed with other uses of lighting (flares, flash-lights etc.) It was more a creature to hide, never to attack full on. Another thing that this remake/prequel fails to attempt that the original succeeded.
Overall; as I keep mentioning through-out this review, John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece is, and will always be, the best! It is far more scary and is done with a lot more care. As Carpenter once said to Empire magazine in 1997; “You’ll never, ever, see anything like The Thing again.” Looks like it will be a long while till we do!
2 out of 5