Some Thing Old, Some Thing New

I was all prepared to love - or at least like - the hell out of the new Thing. Unlike a lot of genre fans, I happily support big budget Hollywood horror. It might not always produce the best results but I always enjoy seeing big money thrown at horror projects. If you can make a kick-ass horror movie with a bunch of no-name actors in a farmhouse or a cabin in the woods, great. But I also like to see bigger scale horror projects realized with state-of-the-art craftsmanship. Movies like The Birds (1963), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), The Shining (1980) and, well, John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) weren't done on the cheap. It took Hollywood's deep pockets to make them happen. So whenever major studios decide that they want to pony up for a horror project, I'm game to see how it turns out.

And sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots - fans generally hate them but I'm mostly all for them. When they're bad, they don't spoil the originals for me. Given my level-headed attitude, I was certain that The Thing (2011) would score a passing mark from me. I even scoffed at some of the early reviews that panned it for a lack of character development and an over-reliance on FX. I mean, come on. Anyone who knows anything about Carpenter's Thing knows that those were the exact same criticisms that were levelled against that classic. So I wasn't about to be that guy and say the same shit about this movie.

Except, now having seen The Thing '11, I kind of have to say them.

As reported, the characterizations are dead on arrival and the FX are both overused and under realized. Even if I didn't know Carpenter's film chapter and verse, this movie still wouldn't play well in my eyes.

It's a shame, too, because it starts off so well. The first half had me hooked. It wasn't headed for a four-star rating but it was, at least, solid. So much so that I was even willing to overlook the curious fact that it starts off with an old-school version of the Universal logo but the wrong old-school version. You'd think they would have pulled out the early '80s Uni logo - like the one that ran in front of Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell (2009) - but instead it's the logo from the early '90s.

Pretty much this one:



Now, I do like that logo - it's attached to some of my favorites, like, um, Dr. Giggles (1992). But it's an odd choice to put on this Thing. Who knows - maybe Universal is just dusting off that old logo for all their movies these days. If so, I hadn't noticed.

Anyhow, a much bigger issue than an oddly chosen studio logo becomes apparent early on in this new Thing: they fuck up the alien spaceship. I mean, everybody who's seen Carpenter's film remembers how the alien spaceship was originally found by the members of Outpost 31 - in an giant open crater, having been revealed by the Norwegians after being buried for God knows how long.

When the men of Outpost 31 watch the video footage of the Norwegians standing in a circle around the buried alien ship, that was Carpenter's nod to the discovery scene in Howard Hawk's 1951 The Thing From Another World (even down to the footage being in black and white). On the video, we see the Norwegians set off their nitrate explosives and later, when MacReady, Norris, and Doc Copper fly out to investigate the site, they stand at the edge of the crater and look down on the exposed ship.

The Thing '11 doesn't bother to match any of this up. At all. In fact it flat-out contradicts it. Kind of a giant fuck-up, if you ask me.

There's no scene of the Norwegian crew standing in a circle to measure the circumference on the saucer, much less anyone videotaping it. There's no setting of explosions to get past the ice to the ship. Instead, they enter through cracks in the ice to find the ship underground.

When a huge selling point from the makers of this film to the fans of Carpenter's film was that this was going to put the pieces of the puzzle together and be a seamless match with the '82 version, well, this is the kind of sloppiness that you just can't forgive. It makes the fact that they take pains to explain the backstory behind such lesser incidents as the the axe embedded in a door that much worse. You know...making sure that the discovery of the spaceship wasn't entirely different in this film from what Carpenter showed probably should've merited more attention. I'm just sayin'.

But even with that colossal gaffe in place, I was still willing to enjoy this Thing as long as the story was involving and the monster action was cool. But on both counts, it comes up short. I bet the original version of the Thing screenplay, by Battlestar Galactica scribe Ronald D. Moore, was pretty good. But the version that director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. ended up working with - a rewrite by Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5) - is definitely not so hot. I like the actors - especially Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton - but there's only so much they can do to bring their characters to life. And the monster action...well, it's better than anything in this year's Super 8 or Creature, at least, so I'll give it some credit. But what FX artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. of Amalgamated Dynamics came up with is ultimately kind of piss poor. With all the advance talk of the film's FX being largely practical and the finished product showing almost no practical FX work, it leads me to think that plans went awry at some point.

I'm not a hater when it comes to CGI but when it's bad, it ought to be called out as such and - outside of a couple of nicely hideous moments - it's pretty bad here. It's not Fright Night bad but it's still not good. Or maybe it'd be more accurate to say that it's badly used. When we see the Thing in full-body action scuttling down hallways after victims, it just looks goofy. Maybe you could objectively study the animation and say that it was a competent job but it's not good for the movie. For the '82 film, Carpenter had a climatic scene of the "Blair-Monster" version of the Thing in action created via stop-motion - by animator Randy Cook - but cut it because it just didn't fit the film. That showed judgment on Carpenter's part. He knew what looked right for his film. Heijningen Jr. - like too many modern directors - doesn't have a clue when it comes to that.

I won't go on and on about how bad this movie is because it isn't terrible so much as it is mediocre. I didn't go in it expecting it to be great but it drops the ball in too many key areas for me to give a favorable nod. Funnily enough, watching this try and fail to successfully imitate Carpenter's film didn't immediate put in the mind to rewatch Carpenter's classic but rather 1989's underwater alien tale Leviathan. That cheeseball Thing rip-off is much more my cup of tea than The Thing 2011. The cast for that - Peter Weller, Daniel Stern, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo, Amanda Pays, Meg Foster - has personality to spare and the old-school practical effects by Stan Winston (who famously lent a helping hand to Rob Bottin on The Thing) remain vividly gruesome. That's as much as I wanted out of The Thing '11.

When you set the bar so low (no offense, Leviathan) that a movie can't possibly fail to meet expectations but it does anyway - well, all you can do is sigh and move on. A satisfying prequel to Carpenter's paranoid classic? Eh, looks like some Things just aren't meant to be.

Whatever It Is, It's Weird And Pissed Off

With today's release of the red band trailer for Universal's prequel to The Thing, I think we've seen enough of the movie to say with some confidence that this will be a lunkheaded version of Carpenter's 1982 film.

That said, I'm still stubbornly looking forward to this movie. No, it won't be the movie I was optimistically hoping it would be back when information first started leaking out about it but I know from this trailer that The Thing will be a full-on monster movie and man, I'll take it. After the debacle of Creature - a movie that couldn't even get the simple thrills of a guy-in-a-suit swamp monster movie right - and Super 8, which had a huge budget but not a decent creature to show for it, I'm ready for any monster movie that can at least come through on the most basic level.

Judging by this trailer, I feel like The Thing might manage that.

It might not manage anything more than that, but that's fine - I'll keep my expectations low. I'm not even that irate about the CGI. It is what it is. And unlike the CGI in the recent Fright Night remake, this looks like it was rendered by people who knew what they were doing. Yes, it'd be nice if this prequel was as moody and well-played as Carpenter's but failing that, I'll settle for a movie that keeps its alien menace weird and pissed off.

The Thing Before The Thing

Months after the production had vanished off the radar to the point where I was beginning to wonder whether the movie would make its October release date, on the heels of the appearance of the teaser poster the first trailer for the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing has made its way online and at first glance, I like what I see. At the very least, there's nothing in this trailer that sets off any red flags.

It's appropriately moody, the paranoia is in play, there's plenty of beards to go around, and it looks like attention is being paid to detail - just from this trailer it's clear that this is going to dovetail nicely with what we learned in Carpenter's film about the Norwegian camp.

In case you haven't already watched the trailer, take a look:



There's a glimpse of CG in this trailer but I also see some practical stuff so I hope that this movie will have a mix of both, but favoring practical as much as possible.

Having been too young to see Carpenter's Thing in theaters, I welcome the chance to see a respectful approximation of it on the big screen (especially if they slip in some of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack). And it's interesting that it's getting an October release rather than the summer one that doomed the original. In John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness by Gilles Boulenger, Carpenter described how leery he was about The Thing's release date:

"What I could percieve before The Thing was released was that the audience was not interested. I was sitting in my office at Universal a few weeks before the movie came out, and I got to read a little study, a demographic study - it was the first time I ever saw one of these things - and they discovered that the market for horror movies had shrunk by 70% over like six months. Since we were making this movie for over a year, I really did not know what we were going to do. The people clearly did not want to see that type of movie anymore and I forgot why. So I went to Bob Rehme, head of marketing at Universal at the time, and I said to him, "Because of the way things are going, I think you should hold this movie back from the summertime, release it at Halloween, and retitle it Who Goes There? Don't put The Thing on it, I have a funny feeling."

Sadly, history proved Carpenter's "funny feeling" to be dead on. Only time will tell whether the prequel will fare any better. All I can say at this early point is that while this new Thing looks worth believing in, appearances can be decieving. Or, to borrow the watchful words found in a poster seen on the walls of the original's rec center, "They Aren't Labeled, Chum!"