Why did I not like The Thing, the prequel of The Thing? The expectations were indeed high, because the potential was so high. In 1982 John Carpenter showed what could be done with this concept and he made a masterpiece, itself helping to propel both the sci-fi and horror genres. It’s a classic. It’s like making a prequel to Citizen Kane, or Gone With the Wind, or Star Wars (oh…wait a second).
You know what it’s like? It’s like watching a guy juggle five chainsaws and think “wow, that looks cool, I can do something like that” and going out and trying to juggle three chainsaws, and while you may awkwardly have them going at first, eventually one of them will slip and you’ll cut off your arm, and people will think “well, it was an admirable attempt I suppose, and he did have those three chainsaws in the air for at least five or six good seconds, so that was something at least. But that other guy, he juggled five chainsaws for a solid minute and didn’t lose a limb in the process. Now that was awesome.” What made these guys think they could juggle chainsaws like John Carpenter?
The story of The Thing ‘11 is very similar to The Thing ’82, in that it is about a remote Antarctic outpost being overrun by an aggressive and hostile alien species. This alien tries to digest its prey and then imitate it completely so it can go on undetected, ready to take over more creatures and animals and whatever it comes across. In The Thing ’11, a bunch of Norwegians find a spaceship buried in the ice and a frozen alien, which they cut out of the ice and bring back to their nice, warm research outpost. The ice thaws, the alien awakens, and hilarity ensues.
The effects were terrible, it was mostly bad CG that never fooled me into thinking that these creatures existed in the same realm as the actors. It doesn’t help that I just saw Real Steel, that had CG boxing robots that looked so good I couldn’t tell what was CG and what was practical. I never got that with this movie. There were a handful of good, practical alien effects, that looked real and gross and physical, but 90% of the alien stuff in this movie was digital, and obviously digital at that. The practical effects done in The Thing ’82 were groundbreaking and forward thinking and broke away from every sci-fi and horror film that came before it. Special effects legends and wizards Rob Bottin and Stan Winston worked on this movie and created the gnarly and visceral creations that plagued those men in that base. In The Thing ‘11, we get wonky digital effects by a roomful of nameless workers behind computers, doing the best with what they had, which apparently wasn’t much. There was nothing groundbreaking or startling or original about any of the effects in this movie. And on top of all of that, they don’t even look good now in 2011, I can’t imagine how bad they will look in five or ten years when people look back on it. On the flip side, The Thing ’82 has effects that still hold up thirty years after it was made (save for a bit quick stop motion animation at the very end). So this prequel is actually a bit of a slap in the face of the original, which isn’t very cool in my opinion.
What makes it all that much worse are the pretty terrible monsters and alien designs in this movie. When they first unearth it and it breaks free it is just an alien bug, and would fit right at home in the Starship Troopers movies. But when it takes people over, there are essentially two types of creature designs. First there are times when people mutate into a bigger, warped version of themselves and their chest opens up to reveal teeth and a tongue and other gross tentacle things and they attack people with their giant chest mouths. The other type is a basically a giant tentacle that whips around and destroys everything, which is boring. The giant chest mouth is always a busy mess of pixels and digital wankery and all looks pretty terrible, and they made the bad decision of constantly keeping the person’s face intact somewhere on the creature’s body, and it looked like something out of The Lawnmower Man whenever a digital face screamed at a person and tried to look menacing. They do come up with a decent looking crab-like double-person, but they really didn’t come up with it because it’s based on Bottin’s design of the burned creature they found in The Thing ‘82, so it’s just a digital version of Bottin’s creation. And we’ve already gone into how bad the CG is, so no need to think it stops here.
Those are just the aesthetics, by the way. Then there’s the issue of the actual goddamn story. This base is loaded with something like 12 to 14 characters, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about a majority of them. There is no character development whatsoever, and when I say no development, I mean no development. There is no sense of who these people are, save for the lead scientist guy who makes all the bad decisions, and we only get the idea that he’s an asshole. And one other guy is an asshole, but he turns out to be the thing and it was obvious from the get go when he was the thing. When people died in this movie, I didn’t care about any of them dying because I didn’t know anything about them. And it is nothing against the actors, they just weren’t given anything to do, because all of the characters were bland and most of them blended together.
There’s the whole “it’s a prequel but also a remake” vibe, because they just did their best to ape Carpenter’s style and make this movie in reverence for The Thing ’82. It’s obvious their hearts were in the right place when they went at this thing, because the attention to detail is pretty incredible, save for one glaring yet nerdy instance. It’s clearly established in The Thing ’82 that the Norwegians found the spaceship buried in the ice and used thermal charges to dig it out and gain access to it. But in The Thing ’11, that never happens and instead the spaceship gets turned on for a hot minute at the end and that melts the ice above it. As stated, this is nerd nitpickery, but considering the slavish attention paid to recreating what was hinted at in The Thing ’82, this was a pretty big and seemingly unnecessary change.
This is a lot like that whole Superman Returns thing a few years ago. When Bryan Singer set out to make his Superman film, he did it in reverence to the original Richard Donner Superman movies. He did everything he could to copy Donner’s style and make a movie that felt like a sequel to Superman II, instead of being its own thing. And while it has its moments and is an okay Superman movie, it’s not very good specifically because it tried to be something its not. Same with The Thing ’11; in trying to be so in tune with The Thing ’82, it robs itself of the chance to be its own unique and stylish movie. John Carpenter didn’t set out to make a 1982 version of The Thing From Another World. He drew his inspiration from that film and the original book and made his own movie, and that’s why it is still awesome all of these years later. The Thing ’11 won’t be remembered at the end of this year, let alone in 2031.
This is supposed to be a horror movie, but there is a startling lack of strong atmosphere and dread and angst and tension and all of the things that make a horror film effective. It didn’t help that they managed to telegraph most of the alien freak outs and who would be the thing and who wouldn’t be, so there was lack of suspense as well. And the ending is just dumb, because they shoe horned in their reasoning for having two Norwegians in a helicopter chasing after a wolfdog in the wilderness; instead of finding a smart and organic way to get to this conclusion, they literally just put the necessary characters aside and hid them, only to bring them out at the end so they could tie it in to the beginning of The Thing ’82, hence robbing the movie of having a real actual ending.
I just wanted this movie to be half as good as the John Carpenter classic, and it wasn’t even that. At the very least, maybe this movie will lead people to discover or even rediscover original, but as it stands, The Thing ’11 is just bad. And that’s unfortunate.
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