It is a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood
that a successful film must be in want of a remake, sequel or prequel and no
movie company is more familiar with this than Universal Pictures, having
originally built its fortunes on its hugely successful Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy series of
pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. When John Carpenter’s big budget remake of THE
THING was released in the early eighties, however, it was a financial disaster,
as would any film about a hideous shape-shifting paranoia-inducing creature in
an isolated Antarctic setting have been in the Summer of Steven Spielberg’s
feel-good ET THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. Time and critical attention have, however,
been immensely kind to Mr Carpenter’s film and it is now rightly recognised as
a classic, considered by many (including myself) to be better than the original
1951 version, which in the world of horror films is a nigh on impossible feat
to pull off. When word went out that it was itself to be the subject of a remake
the first word that sprang to my mind was ‘pointless’, especially when it
turned out that the new film was to be a prequel to Carpenter’s picture, with
the ending therefore being necessarily pre-determined. So it was with my
expectations at rock bottom that I went to see the new version of THE THING, presuming that I may well end up bored, annoyed, frustrated and to come out of the cinema having
wasted time and money. So it pleases me greatly to say that I really rather liked
it.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about THE THING the prequel is not
that it’s actually okay, but that it’s a movie that has been made with fans of
the previous film in mind. In fact someone who loves Carpenter’s THE THING is going
to get a lot more out of this than someone unfamiliar with it, and with any
luck it will send those latter audience members scurrying to pick up the quite
stunning BluRay edition of the 1982 film that’s now available. There’s nothing
at all original here and the plot is entirely predictable, with Mary Elizabeth
Winstead in the Kurt Russell role surrounded by hairy Norwegians with an
increasing propensity to turn into huge
Lovecraftian monsters at the drop of a dental filling. In fact the first scene
in which we discover the creature’s inability to regenerate inorganic material
(in this case an internal fracture fixation device) provides a nice lead-in to
the discovery of what the creature that has just been dug out of the ice, been
defrosted and gone on a killing spree before being gunned down, is actually
capable of. Making the original form of the thing insectoid doesn’t go any way
to explaining how on earth it piloted the ship we get to see, and there’s still
no explanation for why a monster presumably capable of operating such hi-tech
equipment is happy to want to splodge around and randomly kill people when it
could just as easily slope off back to its flying saucer and fly away. But the
number of touches that are there to ensure consistency with Carpenter’s film,
plus some impressive special effects mean that you would have to be
an extremely unforgiving and demanding horror fan not to have a good time with
this. I was expecting ropey CGI but instead I had difficulty distinguishing the
prosthetics (there’s a long credit roll at the end for the prosthetics teams
which had me feeling quite nostalgic in itself) from the digital work. The music
by Marco Beltrami opts for mainly orchestral work this time out, only segueing
into synthesisers at the end for a final sequence that’s the best writer Eric
Heisserer and director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr could possibly have done with
the brief they were presumably given. There are quite a few reviews out there
at the moment trashing this film which is partly why I felt like writing this one up as it really isn’t bad at all and, in a rare thing for sequels
and remakes these days, seems to be acutely aware of its appropriate place in
the movie scheme of Things.
Wow! I actually want to watch something of The Thing things now! I've not watched any of the things yet, as they sounded quite daft things indeed, but it sounds like it depends on the particular The Thing things you select, as some of The Thing things are very much some things to avoid.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I've never seen any of The Thing things.
Yep...I personally hate the movie E.T. ever since it virtually won most of the awards in the oscars and I was outraged when it won over Blade Runner in the special effects category...I bet the judges were bribed.
ReplyDeleteDon't believe this review. It must have been written by the thing, as the new The Thing is crap!
ReplyDelete