John Carpenter's The Thing Review
Kurt Russell Faces an Alien Invasion in this Cult Classic
Aug 10, 2008
Many people anticipated that a new project following in the steps of John Carpenter’s flick would be a prequel or sequel to the original. It seems now that it’s destined to be a re-make, so let’s remind ourselves of what exactly is being re-made in an extensive review.
Man is the Warmest Place to Hide
The plot of the Thing couldn’t be simpler: a twelve-man research team, stationed in the Antarctic, uncover a buried crash site tens of thousands of years old. A semi-human corpse is recovered and thawed out from the ice, only to realize that it is in fact a creature from outer space. It is also far from dead.
It soon becomes clear that this creature has the ability to perfectly imitate anything it comes into contact with and the ranks of the researchers are infiltrated by the invader.
Paranoia and suspence then reigns as the team must determine who is still human to prevent the alien from being introduced into the human population.
Who Goes There? - The Thing From Another World
John Carpenter’s film is, of course, actually a re-make itself, being inspired by the 1951 film The Thing from Another World by Christian Nyby, which in turn was inspired by the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
Carpenter’s version, however, is entirely it’s own beast, and represents a Director at the height of his powers working with one of the greatest ensemble casts in movie history, featuring Kurt Russell as R.J. Macready, Wilford Brimley as Dr. Blair, Keith David as Childs, Donald Moffat as Gary, David Clennon as Palmer, and T.K. Carter, Richard Dysart, Thomas G. Waites, Richard Masur, Joel Polis, Charles Hallahan and Peter Maloney as Nauls, Copper, Windows, Clark, Fuchs, Norris and Bennings respectively.
Of course, what is noticeable about this ensemble is that there are no women involved. According to Carpenter in his entertaining commentary with Russell, there was only one woman to be found amongst the film crew, who left half way through production due to pregnancy, leaving just a bunch of men in a remote location with a lot of beer, some dynamite and a couple of flamethrowers (so it’s a wonder then that the film was ever finished).
At the risk of sounding chauvanistic, this set-up works tremendously well for the cast and gives the film a unique angle and sense of camaraderie.
The ensemble is uniformly excellent, idiosyncratically reacting to the steady decline of trust into personal suspicion and accusation. Kurt Russell excels as cynical pilot Macready as does Wilford “I’ll kill you!” Brimley, who is simply brilliant as the doctor that would rather see them all dead than risk spreading the threat to the rest of humanity.
The understated music score likewise suits the bleakness of the setting, creating a deep-rooted tension that no doubt stayed with most of us who first saw this film long before the legal age of eighteen. Credit for that goes to Ennio Morricone, though it's understood that Carpenter also had input on it’s development.
Bill Lancaster’s screenplay is full of memorable and ‘colourful’ dialogue, whose humour in no way undermines the suspence as it has become prone to do in more modern scripts.
Within the dialogue is to be found, for instance, the most succint of portraits of the creature, containing all the information one would need to know by it’s description as “…weird and p****d off…”, as well as Palmer’s infamous proclamation at the sight of a walking detached head and Gary’s outburst at not wishing to spend the rest of his winter tied to a certain couch (bringing to a close the most definitive and near-mythical scene of the film).
Animatronics Vs CGI?
Naturally, special mention must go to a young Rob Bottin who worked so tirelessly on the creature effects – with the film being his first major project – that he was at one stage hospitalized and required assistance from the prodigious talents of Stan Winston and his team.
As for those creature effects (all animatronic in the age before CGI), they are, 26 years on, still amongst the best ever committed to celluloid. The ‘Thing’ in it’s various manifestations is as innovative as it is horrific and it seems that the only real basis for issuing a re-make of this film is to see whether or not CGI can now emulate those effects (and there is every chance that it won’t come remotely close unless given a great deal of time, money and dedication – bearing in mind that Carpenter’s film had an estimated budget of a mere $10 million).
In fact, with that consideration in mind, film-goers must be wondering why exactly anyone would want to re-make what is essentially a flawless film, that still holds strong as ever today? Will there also be an attempted re-make of Cameron’s Aliens in a few years time? That would be just as pointless.
Given the track record of re-makes over the years it is next to impossible to expect that anything good will come out of this, besides reminding us all to turn out the lights and watch a true classic one more time.
Beware of imitations.
- Producers: David Foster, Lawrence Turman
- Director: John Carpenter
- Screenplay: Bill Lancaster
- Starring: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Donald Moffat, David Clennon.
- Distributed by: Universal Studios
- Release date: June, 1982.
- Running time: 104 mins approx.
