Every Thing In Its Right Place

I'm sure John Carpenter finds it ironic that almost thirty years after the box office failure and critical trashing of his 1982 remake of The Thing prompted Universal to fire him from an adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter (a project that went to director Mark Lester) that Universal is mounting a big budget ($38 million) prequel to that once-notorious film. While the idea of a prequel intrigued me from the start, in recently rewatching Carpenter's The Thing, I realized that my memory had hazed out on the overlap between the Norwegians' doomed attempt to put an end to the Thing and the story of the men of Outpost #31. While I had remembered the dog-disguised Thing arriving at Outpost #31, I had blanked on the fact that it had been pursued there by the last two Norwegians (some Thing fan I am!).

Seeing the opening scenes of the '82 Thing play out, it struck me as cool to realize that this would be the final moments of the upcoming prequel. These two characters would have their backstories fleshed out but, inevitably - once the other members of their camp have been either taken over, killed, or have taken their own lives - these two survivors would take a futile helicopter run across the Antarctic in a last ditch effort to keep the Thing from reaching other potential hosts.

That one is incinerated when a grenade accidentally goes off close to their landed helicopter and the other is shot dead through the eye by Outpost #31's bushy eye-browed commander - with his last sight being the Thing now safely in the company of another group of humans - makes for a nicely nihilistic ending, one that can't be altered by studio notes or test screenings. Knowing that the prequel's storyline has to dovetail with what we see in Carpenter's film (down to such details as why there's an axe embedded in a door in the Norwegian camp or who it was that committed suicide with a straight razor and whose remains were torched outside the camp) makes me think that, if done with care, seeing this mystery unlocked could make for a great film. I just wonder if they'll be incorporating the actual footage from Carpenter's film for the conclusion of the prequel. I'd love to see that - and with subtitles provided for the last Norwegians' final words that he shouts out to the men of Outpost #31 before a bullet blows through his brain.

While there's much about those two Norwegians we don't know yet, we do know that they had escaped infection by the Thing, which makes them a resourceful pair. They may have died in vain but at least they died as men.