Show Me Your Thing And I'll Show You Mine

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As ultimately movie-killing as director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s 2011 version of The Thing's adherence to the layout of John Carpenter's 1982 film gets - it's so frustratingly consumed by a film-geek's need to connect the dots between that film and this prequel that a lot of the air gets sucked outta the room - and as saddening as it is to see that special effects thirty years later still aren't able to top what they did back then with some rubber hoses and putty... well as annoying as all of that was, I still found myself enjoying this movie a little more than I thought I would. While it's kind of abhorrent how thin a line the film walks between paying tribute to Carpenter and ripping him straight off - they call it a prequel but the structure, beat-wise, is a near replica - those basic notes that it's "borrowing" worked then for a reason, and they've still got some juice in them.

Basically, I got freaked out a couple times. The isolated setting (although the 1982 version does a much better job letting us know just how isolated we are out here; this movie seems to take it for granted) and the basic unnatural wrongness that these people are confronted with still manages to add up to a lot of unnerving, even if its riding on fumes now. For example, while it doesn't have the power of the balls-out-insane autopsy scene in the 1982 film, the scene where one unfortunate fellow comes face to face (ahem) with the creature, the way it stops to caress him... that was unsettling, y'all.

I wish the CG overall were a smidge better, but it honestly wasn't as bad as I was afraid it was going to be. There was definitely some creativity to the alien forms they came up with - I do love the way everything becomes a big betoothed vagina, horror of horrors - but they needed to dirty them up. Everything was bizarrely sterile, like scrubbed specimens on a petri dish. A petri dish that's running around beserker, but still. My mind drifted, to this movie's detriment, to the goopy alien gunk in the 2008 horror film Splinter, itself owing a debt the size of Antartica to John Carpenter's movie, which had a filthy realness to it that the monsters here lack.

And as much as I like Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton, don't get me started on the non-entities they were stuck with playing. When you look back at the full team worth of characters that Carpenter fleshed out his station with, it's maddening that this movie couldn't really seem to bother coming up with one non-generic person. At least by going the prequel route and not making an exact remake they spared us the indignity of having any of these people named MacReady or Blair or Childs or Clark or Windows or I could keep going and going - I immediately know who all those names belong to, and I'll be damned if I could tell you who any of the people in the new one are two days after watching it. .