The Thing

A pre­quel to, rather than a remake of, John Carpenter’s 1982 sus­pense-filled hor­ror clas­sic, The Thing is a curi­ous exper­i­ment which, when viewed in rela­tion to its pre­de­ces­sor, per­haps unwit­ting­ly assumes the form of its grotesque, shape-shift­ing sub­ject; attach­ing itself to it, copy­ing it and hid­ing inside it, either afraid or unable to come out and ful­ly exist as its own dis­tinct entity.

With the two films shar­ing a name, Antarc­tic loca­tion, and a num­ber of incred­i­bly sim­i­lar indi­vid­ual scenes, the biggest depar­ture from Carpenter’s ver­sion is the female lead; a spir­it­ed pale­on­tol­o­gist Kate Lloyd (a sol­id turn from Mary Eliz­a­beth Win­stead) who is respon­si­ble for sav­ing the day and lead­ing the fight against the alien that the sci­en­tists discover.

The good news is that the lack of orig­i­nal­i­ty does not pre­clude effec­tive­ness. An atmos­phere of dread and uncer­tain­ty is aug­ment­ed by the rel­a­tive anonymi­ty of the cast with a lack of star names to latch onto (the clos­est is Warrior’s Joel Edger­ton in a beard­ed, Kurt Rus­sell-lite role), and the Nor­we­gian crew’s abil­i­ty to switch into their native tongue at any giv­en moment to con­found and unset­tle their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts. While the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion is thin and deliv­ered in broad strokes, by the time hav­oc breaks loose it’s unlike­ly you’ll care too much.

Although the slick and plen­ti­ful CGI lacks the earthy, vis­cer­al punch of the 1982 ver­sion (which was dis­tin­guished by Rob Bottin’s astound­ing, labour-inten­sive ani­ma­tron­ics), at least one iter­a­tion of the mon­ster on show here is con­vinc­ing­ly, cov­er-your-eyes hor­rif­ic and well-realised. Also note­wor­thy is Elliot Koretz’s deeply unset­tling sound design.

In much the same vein as Juan Car­los Fresnadillo’s fre­net­ic hor­ror 28 Weeks Lat­er, what The Thing lacks in finesse and nuance, it more than makes up for in sus­tain­ing a relent­less lev­el of threat, pro­gress­ing at a fast clip and con­tain­ing its fair share of shocks and surprises.