At an Antarctica research site, discovering an alien craft leads to a confrontation between graduate student Kate Lloyd and scientist Dr. Sander Halvorson.
In 1984, when I was living in Dublin, Ireland, as a precocious 12-year-old, my mother bought our very first VCR. We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to get one, and I had spent the past two years at the local video store, checking out all the video covers for the day when I could rent them. When that day finally arrived, the first three movies I rented were “Blade Runner,” “Watership Down,” and “The Thing,” John Carpenter’s seminal masterpiece.
Suffice it to say, “The Thing” made a lasting impression on my mother and me. When word came out, many years later, early 2009 to be precise, that a new film was in the works, a prequel that would show the events of the Norwegian research station that was featured briefly in Carpenter’s version, we were very excited, as many “Thing” fans were. Still, there was also an air of caution and apprehension. After all, how could anybody improve on Carpenter’s classic?
Still, I was very excited that a new film taking place in the same universe would be released in the coming years. After its release, though, in October of 2011, the movie bombed at the box office, and it didn’t do much better critically. So what happened? Almost 40 years had passed since the release of Carpenter’s film, and the studio, Universal, was probably hoping the die-hard fans would come out in force and support it, but word of mouth spread like wildfire that it was an unmitigated disaster, and the fans stayed away in droves.
So what happened? Fans were outraged that director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. added shoddy and cheap-looking CGI effects to his THING creatures. In contrast, in 1982, Carpenter didn’t have the luxury of CGI, and every beast and monster that appeared onscreen was animatronic. While animatronics worked back in the ’80s and ’90s, by today’s standards, they look fake, but fans were hoping van Heijningen would at least try to keep his monsters in line with his film’s predecessor. Later, it would come out that van Heijningen did shoot all his creature scenes with animatronics, but executives at Universal lost faith in the project and added CGI to almost every monster scene, cheapening its overall appearance.
Van Heijningen would later upload videos to YouTube to prove that he did indeed shoot his monsters as Carpenter had decades earlier, utilizing animatronics with the intent of adding CGI to touch a few scenes up. Suddenly the die-hard fans were calling on Universal to release a Director’s Cut, showing the film without any of the abysmal CGI they foolishly added. Now that Jason Blum of Blumhouse, producer of the new “Halloween” movies and “The Invisible Man,” has stated they are producing a new version of “The Thing,” a new adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.’s classic novella, but this time based on the long lost original novel-length work from the author, maybe Universal will release van Heijningen’s iteration the way he intended to release it, employing animatronics and practical special effects.
The movie occurs in the Winter of 1982 in Antarctica at Thule, a Norwegian research station. Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), the Danish leader of alien research, has just arrived at Thule along with Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an American paleontologist, and his assistant Adam (Eric Christian Olsen). After receiving an invite from his old friend, Edvard (Trond Espen Seim), a notable Norwegian geologist and also the station commander, they discover a spaceship concealed in the ice for over 100,000 years but outside, buried in ice just below the surface, lies the body of, something. They dig it up and bring it back to the station to run tests on it, but it quickly thaws and escapes, causing havoc for everyone. The true horror begins when Kate realizes that the thing can assimilate and imitate its victims and is living among them. Armed with only a flamethrower, she must figure out who’s human and who’s the thing.
The film has a well-rounded cast comprising Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Eric Christian Olsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and a mixture of Danish and Norwegian actors, including Ulrich Thomsen, Trond Espen Seim, Jørgen Langhelle, and Stig Henrik Hoff. The cinematography by Michel Abramowicz is beautifully presented and is shot in the same 2.39:1 aspect ratio as Carpenter’s version, and overall, director van Heijningen manages to build the same creeping, relentless suspense that Carpenter created in his ’82 classic. When Carpenter first released “The Thing” in 1982, it bombed at the box office and was a commercial and critical failure. He even lost the directing job on “Firestarter” as a result.
Only with the advent of home entertainment, particularly VHS, did “The Thing” find its audience and become a cult classic. Even critics and fans who criticized the film upon its initial theatrical release have changed their minds to say that it is now considered one of Carpenter’s all-time best movies. While it took decades for his movie to amass the level of appreciation it now has, I feel the same about van Heijningen’s interpretation. While it is nowhere near as good as Carpenter’s, it is a worthy prequel that I think will stand the test of time. I just hope Blumhouse’s forthcoming iteration will knock it out of the ballpark, possibly creating a THING universe.
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