The Thing

(2011) ***1/2

I suppose I could give the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing less credit. What I liked most about it is the additional context it gave to the '82 movie. It sort of says more about how I liked the first movie enough to want to know more about it, than it does the prequel for filling in the blanks.

All the extra time these characters spend scurrying around the monster's spaceship made me think more about the invading force. I guess I'd always taken it on faith that the monster in its original form was a skittering, tentacled...well, *thing*, I guess you'd call it. I never thought to ask, with a spaceship that large, why there weren't more of them lying around dead when the Norwegian and then the American scientists came to snoop around. It's a massive ship. Was there really only one *thing* on board?

Then in the middle of watching the prequel everything fell into place — and I might be retconning a bit here. Since the thing is a microorganism, it's kind of like the yellow cloud of nasty from Green Lantern or the electrobug swarm version of Galactus in Marvel's Ultimate Extinction (I understand it's the same concept in the second Fantastic Four movie, but I haven't seen it). The *thing* the Norwegians dig out of the ice is not a single *thing*, but rather a composed formation, with limbs and a body with which to operate a spaceship. It's possible that it was operating the ship as an entire crew and then it merged into one body when it was time to abandon ship. If I'd thought about it, I should have been able to reach all of those conclusions after watching the John Carpenter version. But that's half of what makes a remake, or a prequel, or a sequel a good idea — more context for the original story. Purists would argue that if an original is good enough, it needs no sequels or prequels to lend itself context. But hey, all of that stuff I just wrote occurred to me while I was watching this in the theater, and I hadn't thought of it before when I was watching the first movie. So, nyahhh, purists.

Unfortunately the other half of what makes a remake, or a prequel, or a sequel a good idea is it actually being a good movie. And there, this prequel falls flat. I've heard the cast of the '82 version panned as being uninteresting, but I like all of the actors in that cast, and I recognize almost everyone in that cast from other things. I barely recognized the new cast. There's Mr. Eko, and there's the girl from Scott Pilgrim, and the guy from Warrior, which I haven't seen, and the "hurrrh?" looking guy from Dumb and Dumberer, which I also haven't seen. Maybe if I'd seen this instead in like 2020, I could look back and be like, "Oh, cool. That dude. Look how young he is." But for now, meh. The acting is fine, I just felt more connected to Kurt Russell and his companions than to anyone here. Personal problem? Maybe.


Here I am, five paragraphs into a review I'd told Octopunk earlier today I was going to try to mash into one paragraph in a three-way catch up review of The Thing, Jeepers Creepers, and Troll Hunter. Maybe I should have saved all this for the far more deserving 1982 version. Whatever though. If I get around to reviewing that, I'll just copy paste this whole thing into that review. Octo and JPX do it all the time and nobody gives them shit for it.