The story about an alien creature that can replicate and flawlessly impersonate people has been around for a long time. There was a book about this story originally, then there was a film back in the 50s; but when you talk about a movie where an alien crash lands in Antartica and terrorizes an outpost of scientists by mimicking and murdering them, most people think of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing. And with good reason, that film had memorable characters, a nail-biting, don’t trust anyone story, and some of the most ridiculously awesome horror movie effects of all time. It’s a classic of the genre, and what we have here with director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s 2011 The Thing is a prequel that ties directly into that film’s opening moments.
If you recall, that film opens on some Norwegians in a helicopter chasing and shooting at a dog that turns out to be a shape shifting ghoul. We later learn that they were coming from another Antarctic outpost, where a group of scientists discovered a crashed UFO and were subsequently wiped out by what was inside. This movie is the story of that original outpost, of the scientists who first discovered The Thing frozen in the ice. Our protagonist is Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) a Paleontologist who gets recruited to help dig out and study the find. Also along for the ride is Carter (Joel Edgerton), a helicopter pilot whose main purpose in the film is to give us another American character (we can’t be surrounded by just Norwegians, Middle America wouldn’t go see that!), and to physically resemble a young, bearded Kurt Russell. Winstead and Edgerton do fine in their roles, as do the other, more Scandinavian actors; but that’s not really important here. What matters in a movie like this is how they did with the scares and the creature effects.
Unfortunately, I can only give them a barely passing grade as far as the scares go. From the moment the monster breaks free of his icy prison, which happens early on, he is running around full bodied and fully rendered. Perhaps because this movie is being treated as a prequel to a preexisting property they think that we’ve already seen what The Thing looks like, so there’s no reason to try and play coy with its appearance; but that doesn’t make for a very scary horror movie. There needed to be a slower build to the revealing of the creature. It needed to lurk in the shadows, giving us only glimpses of what it looked like. It needed to play a cat and mouse game with the humans, building tension and pushing them to the limits of how much terror they can handle. Instead, there are a couple of fake out scares that worked early, and there is some decent tension built in the second act where you don’t know who is human and who is a Thing, but mostly it seems like they ignored what it takes to make a good horror movie in favor of crafting big action scenes. It seemed like they were more interested in showing off how impressive the designs of their CG creatures were than actually scaring anyone with them.
I’ve gone off on rants about how modern films use too much computer generated special effects work a million times before, but in the horror genre it is especially egregious. Horror needs to be tactile in a way that animated effects aren’t. You need to feel like a horror creature is really there interacting with the actors. It needs to pulse and ooze, to leak real slime, puss, and blood onto its victims. Even if it doesn’t look quite real, puppetry, guys in suits, and makeup effects can be scary in ways that CG graphics can’t, because they’re actually there. There is a disconnect when something is animated. You know that the actor is just looking at nothing, and whatever the fear receptor in our brains is doesn’t get tricked. The first time a human being explodes into a tentacled, fanged blood beast in this movie it just looks so bad. There isn’t a second where it looks like anything other than animation, and when is the last time you got scared by a cartoon? The best scene is probably a simple one where the scientists have the charred creature up on an operating table dissecting it, and it’s because they’re actually touching physical props that really exist. We see them cut open The Thing’s stomach membrane, goop leaks out, and it’s grosser than anything else in the film by far.
The other reason CG just doesn’t work for horror is that we aren’t scared by spectacle, we’re scared by what we can’t see. No matter how gross and detailed your creature design is, what we have lurking around in our minds is going to be even worse. When a creature hiding in the shadows is taking people out I’m wondering where it is, what it is, what’s going to happen next? It’s in the anticipation that horror finds its chills. When the beast is standing in front of us, in all of its CG glory, things play more like an action or a sci-fi film. Hordes of computer animated robots fighting armies of people while big explosions go off in all directions is what these sorts of modern special effects should be used for, not a film where a creature is picking people off one by one in an enclosed space. And CG even ruins some of the action elements as well. For the entire third act Winstead and Edgerton are surrounded by columns of CG flames, feeling none of the heat, none of the effects of the fire. For a movie to be effective we need to feel what the characters are feeling. A movie with this much fire should make us smell the singed flesh, feel the lick of the flames. These characters don’t feel anything, so we might as well be playing a video game.
There are some cool creature designs here, some real creepy stuff that’s part human corpse, part giant insect, part gaping wound; but it never looks real, it looks like a trick I’m supposed to appreciate intellectually. Carpenter’s Thing worked because it pushed practical effects to their limit in a way nothing before it had, to shocking effect. In a post-CG world where anything imagined can be cooked up, none of this stuff is very impressive anymore. I would have rather Heijningen and company tackled the problem of trying to top Carpenter’s effects by not topping them at all. Instead they should have gone back to the tricks of old school filmmaking, the Jaws method of not showing the shark until the very end. The 1959 version of The House on Haunted Hill scared people because it put them in a house full of unknowable horrors, the 1999 version of the film made everybody laugh because it put them in a house full of CG ghosts like an episode of Scooby-Doo. If this new Thing had taken the 1959 approach it would have not only been more effective, it could have separated itself from the 1982 Thing by being a different type of film.
But this Thing doesn’t want to set itself apart from that Thing. They call it a prequel, and technically it is, but in practice it plays much more like a remake. We’re essentially watching the same movie over again, with the same character archetypes, the same setting, the same kills, and the same sequence of events played out in the same order. What’s the point? Just call a spade a spade and admit that this is a remake of The Thing for a new generation. This movie spends a lot of time in its third act trying to connect its events to the first scene of the 1982 film, and it’s all time and effort wasted. If they would have just admitted that this is a remake they could have taken the basic plot and movie monster and done whatever they wanted with it. Don’t get me wrong, this movie isn’t really bad. In general it’s perfectly acceptable action/horror. But it all seems so pointless when it fails to improve on the 1982 version in any way. And now we see ourselves faced with a new kind of dilemma. What if this does well financially? Will we then get a sequel that actually will be a direct remake of Carpenter’s film? Will we have to watch the exact same stuff play out for a third time? Count me out, I’ll just revisit the one with Kurt Russell instead.
