Things

Oh, mercy me... I'm just so funny with my subtle humour... for this post is all about the 2011 movie, called The Thing, which was made as a prequel to a 1982 movie, also called The Thing, both derived from a 1938 novella by John W. Campbell called Who Goes There?. There's also the small matter of a 1951 movie The Thing from Another World... But the less said about that, the better.

So... Things.

Ahem.

The original movie, starring a very youthful Kurt Russell and directed by John Carpenter, is one of my all-time favourite horror movies. The reason for this is simple: certain scenes burned themselves into my memory, the very epitome of "you cannot unsee this". It got to the point that I could remember the scenes, but couldn't be sure which movie they were from over the 15-odd years since I first saw it on home VHS, but the memory of the defibrillator scene, the blood tests, the upside-down, crabwalking head, and the guy pushing his hand into another guy's face are absolutely indelible.

Part of the reason for this is the groundbreaking special effects, all of which were practical - that is to say, both scale models and full-size models, animatronics, and buckets of fake blood. That may sound outré by today's standards, where almost everything on our cinema screens is computer generated but, as artificial as some of those models looked, they were more real than anything CGI can dole out, even today.

So it was rather a surprise to read that the makers of the new The Thing were intending to do as much as possible using practical effects, rather than relying on CGI for everything. A movie that explains the events leading up to the 1984 film, and also honouring its SFX team by using their methods? What sorcery is this?

Now that I've seen it for myself, I can confirm that there are lots of CGI shots throughout the movie, and they do stick out like a sore thumb. The practical effects are decent, generally of higher quality than those from John Carpenter's version in terms of fine detail... but, ultimately, they're just not as memorable.

Fair warning: there may be spoilers ahead...

OK, no, there are spoilers.

Really, there are.

Essentially, what you've got is a combination of events from the 1951 movie (block of ice brought into the research station) and the 1982 movie (almost everything else), so you know pretty much exactly what to expect at every stage. It also lets you know what's about to happen all too often, killing most of its surprise. I only jumped at two points, and one of them was one of the characters shouting "Boo!" after sneaking up behind one of the others, right near the start.

It also makes a couple of mistakes, as far as I'm concerned... First and foremost, 'infected' people are way too talkative. I'm pretty sure that, once someone had been 'turned' in Carpenter's version, they didn't tend to have much dialogue. Another issue is that this is a creature in which every cell is capable of acting independently (according to Carpenter's version)... and yet, when one of the littler critters gets chopped in half, rather than become twice as dangerous, it skitters about and tries to knit itself back together. This is its downfall, as it becomes vulnerable as soon as it stays still for the few moments it needs to reconnect.

Then, of course, there's the issue of the dog. The 1982 movie begins with a dog running over the snow and ice, pursued by a sniper in a helicopter so, of course, that's how this one has to end... But the dog is 'absorbed' very early on, and then doesn't appear again until the very end.

Oh, and that's another thing (hahah... OK, I'm going to stop now) - Whereas the first film ended with the two survivors at an impasse (and both probably freezing to death, assuming both were human, which was deliberately left to the viewer's imagination). This one has a big climax inside the alien spacecraft, then Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character torches her colleague because he's been assimilated... and then the scene fades to black. All things considered, it seems highly unlikely that she hasn't been assimilated herself, but that possibility is not explored, it's just left hanging - and not as effectively as the sense of doubt at the end of Carpenter's movie. Then, we cut back to the base camp, as a very familiar helicopter is arriving. Then the dog turns up. Then the only certain survivor gets the pilot to fly after the dog so he can shoot it.

Don't get me wrong, I actually quite enjoyed the film for what it tried to do... but it didn't bring anything really new to the story (apart from CGI, and the idea that the creature spat out anything inorganic from the bodies it absorbed  - titanium plates from broken bones, fillings from teeth, etc), and some of it was quite contrived - I mean, how did the helicopter pilot and co-pilot survive the crash and walk back to the base through the snowstorm? Plus, it used so many obvious horror movie plot devices... Not just those from Carpenter's version, but plenty more for other movies.

Overall, unoriginal, but pretty good fun.

In other news, I'm off to work tomorrow... though not in any of the expected ways. To cut a long story short, no decision has yet been made on the permanent job (they'll be deciding who they're bringing back for a second interview soon), and the 2-week holiday cover job that turned into a 9-month maternity cover job has been cut down to one month only, because they can't afford a temp for 9 months. I've been advised to make myself indispensable so that, when the month has elapsed, they'll decide to renew me (assuming I haven't been offered the permanent job by then).


Normally it takes about a week to make myself indispensible...

We shall see...