The Thing (2011)

It pretty much goes without saying that any review of 2011's prequel of the 1982 "classic" The Thing will mostly be a comparison between the two movies. The general consensus (at least according to Rotten Tomatoes) is that the 2011 version is less a comparable piece of film-making and moreso a mangled afterbirth of the most hallowed of sci-fi horror films. I'm here to tell you that that is wrong, for a multitude of reasons.

1) The original movie is just pretty good. Yes, it's nerve-wracking to try and figure out who, if anyone, is currently inhabited by an unfathomable monster. Yes, the practical visual effects are very much borne out of a genius level of creativity. Yes, Kurt Russell's hat is one of the greatest treasures in cinematic history:



but that doesn't mean that the movie is the flawless, perfect gem that it has somehow aged into in the public consciousness.

2) The movie looks great. As I mentioned before, the effects in the 1982 film were incredible but the advancement of computer-generated effects has allowed this later film to explode with disturbing creativity. This is not to take away from the puppeteering that also goes on in 2011 The Thing but seeing a human body contort in unbelievable angles before erupting with alien carnage, tentacles, and who knows what takes the viciousness of the creature to a whole different level. It's one thing to (like in the original) poke tentacles through your prey. It's another thing to hold it right up close to you until your faces fuse together, creating a disgusting abomination of human and alien skin and viscera. Nearly thirty years later, it's possible to make a bigger, badder, more real enemy, one for whom the scope of their violence and heinousness can actually keep up with the brilliant minds that created it.

That being said, with any special-effects heavy movie, you do run the risk of putting it all on the line in the big showdown. When you've got too much CGI going on, you lose any touch with the human element. While 2011's version does come to a kind of hokey climax, 1982's isn't much better.

3) One of the criticisms that I have read stated that, by showing the alien early on in the film, the creature loses its potency and mystery. It's something I refer to as Jaws Syndrome. Enough people have said that Jaws was scary because you saw little of the shark until the end, a running assumption is that movie monsters are best left vague. The argument that was made was that, in the case of The Thing not knowing what the creature was up to made it that much more of a menacing foe.

But the thing about the Thing from The Thing is how does seeing an obscured-in-ice outline of the alien give anything away? We don't even have any reason to believe that this is the alien's original form. We know that it is capable of copying its prey at a cellular level, so who's to say that it didn't copy some giant crab creature before crashing into the Earth? If anything, I suspect that the ship the alien crashed in wasn't the "Thing"'s ship in the first place. Based on what we know about the monster's physiology (quick, sudden movements using lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of squirmy, tentacles), I don't see this being a species that has mastered space travel. It's more likely an Alien situation where some poor schmuck landed on the wrong planet and got Thinged. The point that I'm trying to make is that there is still plenty of mystery and wonder surrounding the film's antagonistic vagina-mouthed squid-beast even if you do see it in a less familiar shape.

4) It's difficult to say that one of these films is worse than the others when the prequel pretty much is the original. It's like whoever threw the 2011 version together sketched out the first movie, sucked out all the details and put new ones in. I wouldn't be surprised if you could play both movies on TV's next to each other and have it sync up like Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz. At least when deviation happens, there's an effort made to create some variety. In the 1982 version, the survivors test their blood to see who's an alien, to very gory results. In the 2011, the survivors plan on testing their blood but end up resorting to a more rudimentary test which leads to a similar destructive explosion of violence. The only reason someone would say that one is better than the other is because whichever one they see second will feel like a rip-off of the first. I'm sure that someone seeing this version first would go back and feel just as frustrated with the seemingly copied formula of the 1982.

5) What probably impressed me the most about the new The Thing was its ability to be a prequel that makes you forget it's a prequel. Anyone who has seen the original knows that only two men are allowed to survive. Somehow, though, you start to forget about all that and just focus on the fight for survival. Then, as everything winds down, the beginning of the closing credits slaps you in the face with a reminder of just how much attention was paid to making sure that everything's ready to go for the sequel. In a series of shots, you see sets, props, and dead bodies all arranged in the familiar way we saw back in John Carpenter's "original." It's a big "Duh" moment, as in "of course that was going to go down that way, I've already seen how this ends up!" but it nonetheless comes as a bit of a surprise that it was all leading up to something familiar.

To be clear, I am not saying that 2011's The Thing is better than 1982's. What I am saying is that if you take the time to recognize that imitation is a sincere form of flattery, there's no reason you can't watch both and feel like you're getting a single, well-structured narrative, with enough flame throwers in both parts to keep everyone happy.

Rating: 3.0 stars