The Thing

I don't consider myself particularly smart, but unfortunately, I can predict painfully accurately the appearance, expectations, outcome, and my overall impression of a substantial part of films. The film industry is trying to fulfill the task of producing a commercially successful film and at the same time appeal to the target audience. It was clear that the plot of Carpenter's legendary The Thing prequel could not take place among a group of Norwegians in a remote Antarctic base, because the decisive revenue still comes from the American market and the American viewer is truly self-centered, so attempts to place a blockbuster among European, Asian, or South American characters, with few exceptions, do not end well. It was also necessary to consider the female audience and the shift in the actions of female characters, who have been emancipated significantly since the 80s and are leading many action movies. Likewise, it was necessary to consider the significant American ethnic minority, and thus we have the composition of the main characters. The plots of films have also significantly accelerated since the 80s, and the audience has gotten much younger, so that had to be taken into account as well. By the way, at the expense of the film's quality, and because Matthijs van Heijningen clearly admires Carpenter and tries to follow in his footsteps, he doesn't understand what made the original film great. It was characterized by a dominant atmosphere of collective mistrust, hysteria, creeping fear of uncertainty, and the issue of who could still be trusted. If there's one thing missing in Heijningen's film, it's precisely such an atmosphere. Carpenter worked with long shots, and the key scenes were not the ones where the Thing ripped through human bodies, but the ones where the polar explorers confronted each other. If horror fans were able to discuss at length how a flamethrower ended up on a polar base, in Heijningen's film, I find incomparably more logical gaps and obvious nonsense. It's not a disaster, and within the genre, it's perhaps a decent average mainly due to the attractiveness of the source material, but this successor is nowhere near the quality of Carpenter's original film. I assumed it would turn out that way, so I avoided the premiere at the movie theater, and that was the right decision. Overall impression: 40%. (2012-02-11)

The Thing is not a bad movie. A useless film? Yes, but not a bad film. Well, not exactly. The director has a flair for the right horror atmosphere, helped by a more than good score by Marco Beltrami and a bunch of special effects artists who did an amazing job (seriously, because they combined state-of-the-art digital effects with excellent models and masks in a way that would make Stan Winston rejoice). It's worse with the film’s lousy script. The people who wrote it, in my opinion, let themselves get too tied up with the fact that they were writing a prequel and that they had to follow the original film with so many things (the axe in the wall, the ice "sarcophagus", the two-headed monster, the dog, the polar bear with his throat cut...) that they forgot about originality. Alas. I liked the beginning of the film, which honored the short story template, I liked ideas like the one with the seals and just about every scene with The Thing in action, but I still felt like I was watching something I'd already seen once before that had "only" been dressed up in a fancier coat. I was also sad to see how the script flubbed the characters (most of them are easily confused individuals) and several times also the logic (the helicopter crash and who survived it). Still, I was not offended by the new version of The Thing and I would not dare to give it less than a slightly above average three stars. (2012-01-31)

A film that, while simple and partly a remake, still managed to deliver many memorable scenes. It is atmospheric, technically very well made (old-school effects in a modern package), and with good performances. Yes, the Antartic landscape greatly contributes to the success of the whole piece, but for a film where I didn't expect much, to get a proper dose of tension and entertainment? That hasn't happened to me within the Hollywood mainstream for a long time. So definitely a thumbs up, and it doesn't embarrass the original film by Carpenter at all. (2012-02-22)

It's not bad, just completely useless, because the space that the prologue of the first film leaves open is unreasonably narrow for a prequel. In addition, the filmmakers are far too respectful and self-confident, thereby creating something on the edge between a prequel and a remake, which fails due to the inability to evoke the chilling and depressing atmosphere of the original film, but also that they opted for a female protagonist, thus pushing The Thing closer to Alien, which is a type of horror from which Carpenter's opus differs mainly in its focus on collective psychology and a paranoid atmosphere. Heijningen Jr. stayed in the middle - he didn't ruin anything, and he didn't create anything... I don't understand why the sequel in the style of the excellent PC game The Thing wasn't filmed. That has much greater potential... (2011-12-13)

Matthijs van Heijningen (fuck how does he expect to get into the subconscious with that name) may have played Silent Hill and Dead Space and enjoyed watching Hellraiser, so it’s kind of a shame he hasn't seen the original The Thing he was prequelling. An horror movie utterly devoid of ambition where nothing works apart from the two creatures, and it's distressing to watch the film try to pretend it’s not the case. The CGI is terribly boring, the characters are as flat as Milla Jovovich, instead of a final climax we get a routine visit to a spaceship (incidentally, the fact that the hole to it was supposed to be blown by the Norwegians is somewhat forgotten), and whereas in the original the space nastiness was rather sneaky and insidious, here it rearranges rooms with the nonchalance of the Hulk. Puke up and forget. (2011-11-20)