THE THING Movie Review
By:Rama
So let's see what Rama thought about the prequel to THE THING and if it's worth going to watch. Make to follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
‘O, so that’s how it got started. Ok, good to know. Next!’ That pretty much describes how I feel about THE THING prequel. For almost 30 years, some wondered what happened to that Norwegian camp that Kurt Russell visited in the John Carpenter-directed version. Why was that one dude seated frozen with his throat slit?! The events leading up to the chopper chasing the dog. THE THING prequel attempts to answer those questions and although the film is not poorly made, perhaps it’s a story that may not necessarily need to be told because the mystery of it all was part of the old film’s attraction, especially to those of us who weren’t familiar with the material, “who goes there” that became the basis for this franchise.
But I tell you this much, in my opinion, the special effects and the creature by master Rob Bottin, in Carpenter’s film were way more gory, way more impressive, way scarier than the CG FX in this prequel…
Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller “The Thing,” paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up.
When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.
“The Thing” serves as a prelude to John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film of the same name.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, whose beauty lies somewhere between cute and sexy, is the lead in this self-proclaimed prelude. The way I’d describe her performance and her look in this film is.. Nicole Kidman meets Jodie Foster. I was half-hoping that Winstead’s character, Kate Lloyd would somehow be cinema’s badass heroine since Ripley but Winstead, despite her best effort, couldn’t quite get there.
Sure she gets to make use of one of the flamethrowers but that’s only whenever nobody else is carrying it. And when she does take charge, she lacks certain attitude and intensity. Either she’s afraid or the script wouldn’t allow.
Or perhaps it’s because there doesn’t really seem to be a defining showdown between Winstead and THE THING.
I’m disappointed in the fact that for a movie that preludes Carpenter’s 1982 adaptation, this movie fails to showcase ’80s technology, at least none that I could recall.
It’d be nice if it had atari game or old skool chess computer in the rec room.
Even the scene showing the alien cells consuming and imitating human cells doesn’t come close to resembling what Carpenter envisioned. It looked as if they brought today’s technology to a story that’s supposedly set in the ’80s. I was looking for some retro nostalgic feel but didn’t receive one.
As I mentioned earlier and this is probably just me but I think the special effects of the creature, especially in its morphing stages, was way more frightening in the original film. There was something about that clay approach that felt more disturbing, more gross, and at the same time fascinating.
The CG creature in this prequel doesn’t look bad, but it just doesn’t carry the same horror magic as the days of the clay and molds.
THE THING prequel has enough surprise elements to keep you on the edge of your seat, but it’s nothing extraordinary.
GRADE: 3 out of 5
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