4 gibbles out of 5
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.
Carpenter’s original The Thing is an amazing movie, certainly one of his best and one of my favorite slow-burn horror movies, but it has its flaws. So does The Thing remake / prequel. However, as written by Eric Heisserer and shot by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., The Thing manages to do what so few remakes figure out – that a remake can only get so far on nostalgia, and needs to be able to stand as its own film.
Heisserer previously wrote the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, which attempted to do something similar – updating the script, keeping awareness of what came before but trying to give the character’s unique voices. Though the original Nightmare might’ve set a standard in teens-in-distress horror, as produced under the Platinum Dunes banner, the Nightmare remake was chopped out and quick-cut edited into yr run-a-the-mill modern flick. How ‘The Thing’ managed to slip out unmangled by whatever studio manipulation there was is a good question, but the wiki page makes it sound like the director and writer had a strong shared vision for bringing this to the screen, and perhaps that strength helped.
Whatever. Here are the main concessions that purists are complaining about:
-Monster is shown too early. Carpenter’s Thing is a plodding film that builds and builds, here, right away, we are told that they’ve found something strange in the ice and an early escape of said strangey shows us the shadowed creature in some CGI goodness. This is one of those mixed bag arguments that comes down to what you want from a remake. What is the purpose of a remake? Sometimes, perhaps it’s truly to re-make something with updated tools and technology, sharpening things that, at the time of the original production, simply couldn’t be done well. Sometimes it’s an inspired remake – this film made me feel X Y years ago. Now that times have changed, I’ll have to make a different movie to achieve X, but the inspiration will remain the same. If you do the former, oldies and cool kids will shake their heads and tell you not to mess with their shit. If you do the latter, oldies and cool kids will shake their heads and say you ripped off their shit. In the middleground are people who like explosions. Whatever way you go, maybe you make some money, but critically you’re damned. The Thing remake tries to straddle this by dropping the dime early – we want you to know it’s a monster movie, and you know what the film is about, so boom, look, here it is – and then with that out of the way, we can sit back for some more Carpenter-esque scares. And at the end of it, duff off, because CGI or practical, the monster design in this film is absolutely on par with the original, coming off as both – yes – inspired by the old film and unique in its own right.
-It’s no longer all men. This is a tough one. The mixed gender cast is a staple of modern horror. We have one female here, and she’s as bundled in winter coats as the rest, has her weaknesses as with the rest, and holds her own as well as the rest. As a horror movie, the men-huddled-’round-the-flame feel of Carpenter’s film was unique, but as a psychological thriller, the all male cast fit. Furthermore, with the change in tone of the characters (see the next nit), having one female enhanced the divide between characters a bit, and there’s this underlying fear that the men are going to overwhelm our lead, so I think it worked in the film’s benefit. Was this a studio concession? Perhaps. But I think it worked, and Winstead was a great pick for the part.
-They’re scientists, not bearded-gruffheads. Part of the approach of the original was to drum up the unknown concept by having characters who couldn’t assess the situation with analytical training. This is similar to the remake quandary. But I think in making a film of this nature in modern times, we have to be aware that even an audience who perhaps hasn’t seen the original is going to intuit information about these creatures just by being alive in an age where all pop-culture is part of some kind of Jungian shared subconscious, or some other poor comparison that’s an attempt to sound educated. Meaning – as the Scream film attempted to embrace some years back – the way to combat “I know where this is going,” sometimes, is to face it head on. Plus, all of your teen horror flick remakes are stocked by idiots, so having some sensible people dealing with these things was nice for once.
Whoosh, that was a lot, yes? The summary is that there’s a lot of respect for the original film – small visual details, the soundtrack – with an obvious desire to make something that works in modern times. It gets a little silly at the end (as the first one did as well), and there are a couple moments where you wonder if people would really respond the way they are, but overall a solid effort. Most importantly, it makes me want to watch the original again – not to negatively compare – but because it made me appreciate the film differently.
"It don't look like no remake ta me."
vaguely-offensive 