The Thing Review

Ostensibly a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter classic of the same name, this incarnation of The Thing is much like the creature it depicts: An insidious, defective mimic of the real, er, thing. It's not an entirely lost cause, but it is a needless one.

Like it's two predecessors (lest we forget, Carpenter's film was itself a remake of a classic adaptation of the novella "Who Goes There"), The Thing chronicles what befalls a research team in Antarctica who discover an ancient alien buried in the ice. This parasitical organism can infect any living being, creating an exact replicate of them who will then pay it forward.

This version's protagonist is paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who is drafted into taking a journey to the remote research station of a team of Norwegian scientists (the ill-fated group from the beginning of the '82 movie) by her colleague Adam (Eric Christian Olsen) and his cold boss, Dr. Halvorsen (Ulrich Thomsen). Surprise! This scientific discovery of a lifetime will prove to be the end of most of them.

Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. does a commendable job in recreating the production design and some of the touches from the 1982 film, with the script taking advantage of some of the bits from the Carpenter film's depiction of the ravaged Norwegian station. The mimicry of those aspects of the '82 film are understandable -- and the film's coda does a fine job of directly leading into the opening of Carpenter's movie -- but it's the script by Eric Heisserer (who also penned the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street) that commits the sin of too closely paralleling its predecessor, to the point of almost being a beat-for-beat replay of the paranoid events of the '82 film.

That is until the third act where the movie truly takes a turn towards the ridiculous. I don't hate this version of The Thing, but there is one thing that I do hate about it: By putting a new spin on what the alien can and can't replicate, by making it canon if you will, it calls into question actions depicted in the first film. A remake/prequel/whatever shouldn't make you go look for the flaws in the original. If the alien can't duplicate inorganic matter then how can it have the exact same clothes as the person it just tore to a bloody mess?

IGN Interviews The Thing Cast

The cast does what they can to make the material come alive and to create palpable tension, but they are stymied by their underwritten, stock characters. Winstead is a screen presence you can't help but root for, imbuing the movie with a much needed humanity, but her character is a cipher. Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje are essentially this film's version of Kurt Russell and Keith David, but alas as cool and competent as both those actors are they can't hold a candle (or, in this case, a flamethrower) to MacReady and Childs. Thomsen, a dead ringer for Lost in Space's Dr. Smith, plays the ego-driven scientist and the film's human villain, but his arc is completely predictable. Olsen's character hardly registers.

The special effects quickly devolve into over-the-top goriness, with some of the Thing's forms coming across as more ludicrous than terrifying. There are some risible CG moments involving the morphing of actors' faces with the creature's, and the whole last act falls apart into a "chase the CG bogey monster before it gets you" sequence devoid of any true suspense or originality. The final act's setting also opens up a whole can of worms not worth delving into for the sake of spoilers, suffice to say it's ridiculous and, again, makes you question what is supposed to happen just days later in the Carpenter movie. The last act just crystalizes everything that's wrong with this Thing: It simply runs amok looking to scare you by aping what it had done so much better before.

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