Some remakes look at the original, focus on what made it great, then expand on that while adding suitable new elements to create a film that both salutes the original and updates it for a new time. We call those films Footloose (in cinemas now!). Other remakes just do the same things over again with only the barest idea of why they worked in the first place and then throw in some new stuff that only serves to make things worse. And by “make things worse”, I mean “make this remake of The Thing worse”.
Fans of John Carpenter’s 1982 version (itself a radical remake of the 1951 original) will recall that the US Antarctic base besieged by a shape-shifting alien didn’t actually discover the alien – that honour went to a Norwegian base dozens of kilometres away. By telling the story of what happened on that Norwegian base this is technically a prequel rather than a remake: by making that story pretty much identical to the 1982 version, “remake” is what it actually is.
So when a couple of Norwegian scientists crash their snowmobile into a crevasse that has an alien spaceship at the bottom, of course they call on a couple of American grad students (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Eric Christian Olsen) to help dissect the frozen alien they uncover. Okay, the students are working with an actual Norwegian scientist (Ulrich Thomsen), but it’s the kind of pandering that doesn’t inspire confidence, especially when it turns out there is also an American pilot (Joel Edgerton), at the base (to be fair, his presence does make more sense). Still, maybe this is going to lay the groundwork for some serious us vs them paranoia later on, right?
Having a giant alien ice-cube in the basement quickly proves to be too tempting for this crack team of scientists, and they promptly drill into it for tissue samples before all dying because they didn’t follow the most basic quarantine procedures and alien germs wiped them out. Okay, that didn’t happen – but it’s yet another worrying sign that something as obvious as that is just skipped over.
Turns out drilling into a frozen alien is a really good way to wake it up, but for once our cast are on the ball and the alien menace is quickly taken care of. Or is it? The tissue samples they’re examining reveal the alien seems to be capable of taking on other forms. Human forms. They can’t trust anyone! Which might be worrying if there was ever any sign that they previously did trust anyone.
To be positive for a moment, the various body horror effects around the alien’s shape-shifting abilities are pretty nasty to behold. There’s a fair amount of messed-up alien/human creature action here, and while it’s not exactly original – long-time David Cronenberg fans won’t see much new here – it’s not something recent horror films have focused on either.
Where this really falls down is with the humans. Not only do most of the Norwegians look basically the same (blonde, bearded, unwashed), there’s next to no attempt to give them distinct personalities. So when we’re supposed to be worried if someone is actually an alien, it’s more likely we’re wondering who the hell they are in the first place. There is one scene where they figure out a way to tell aliens from humans that is moderately effective, but one decent scene does not a great horror movie make. Watch The Thing Movie Online
Things don’t exactly improve when this turns into a straight-forward battle against alien creatures, and the ending takes what started out as a claustrophobic tale of paranoia and turns it into a D-grade action blockbuster. Trading almost entirely on the goodwill generated by the 1982 version, this lacks wit, decent performances or any real sense of menace. Relying almost entirely on special effects for the few scares it does have, it’That classic “creature feature” “The Thing” earns its third treatment with a film that’s so enthralled with its actual “thing” that it forgets to be scary or suspenseful. A decent cast and a pristine glacial setting are wasted on a movie of alien transmutations and alien dissections that lacks urgency, or even a sense that’s its very cold in Antarctica.
The Norwegians have found something Down There — beneath the ice. And they want to keep it secret. So they drag a t0o-young American paleontologist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) with a bit of experience dealing with ancient frozen corpses and a few other folks in to figure out what it was that crawled out from that gigantic saucer that’s buried under 100,000 years worth of glacial ice.
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The Norwegians, led by the arrogant Dr. Dr. Halvorsen (Ulrich Thomsen) smell a Nobel prize in this discovery, “our visitor.” Keep it quiet. No radio contact with other bases on the frozen continent, even though there’s a storm coming in. The Americans — Kate Lloyd (Winstead) and the helicopter pilots, Carter (Joel Edgerton) and Jameson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) are instantly wary.
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