Review: The Thing

Scientific personnel at an American base in Antarctica come across a Norwegian helicopter, but before they can rescue the crew (including D-grade veteran Norbert Weisser), the chopper blows up, leaving only a half-wolf/half-dog behind, which the crew take back to base. Bad idea. This is no ordinary dog, but a shape-shifting alien that digests then imitates any creature it comes into contact with. It doesn’t take long for the alien to infiltrate the small crew, and soon paranoia sets in as everyone wonders just who is really themselves anymore? Kurt Russell is our gruff, level-headed protagonist MacReady, with Wilford Brimley as scientist Blair, a hero of a different kind, who nonetheless starts to flip out under the claustrophobic pressure. Other assorted crew members are played by respectable character actors like Keith David, Donald Moffat, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, Charles Hallahan, David Clennon, and T.K. Carter.

I really don’t go out of my way to write contrary reviews to popular film ‘classics’, but I won’t deny that I do enjoy posting my more controversial opinions. Aren’t they after all, the more interesting ones to read? And just as my repeated viewings of “Blade Runner” have failed to illuminate me on that film’s supposed greatness, I’ve viewed this 1982 John Carpenter (“Dark Star”, “Halloween”, “Big Trouble in Little China”) remake of the 50s sci-fi film “The Thing from Another World”, (which I like even less, by the way) several times now, to no real satisfaction. Despite poor critical reaction on release, I know a lot of people love this film and will defend it fiercely as Carpenter’s masterwork, but I’ve never quite warmed to it (pun wholeheartedly intended). In fact, I think the critics of the film at the time of release, were mostly on the money about this flick. Carpenter (who I respect and admire greatly) seems to be of the opinion that the release of the cute and cuddly “ET: The Extra Terrestrial” meant audiences were ill-prepared and disinterested in a harsher, bleaker and more gruesome vision of extra terrestrial life. I’ve heard him state this several times over the years, and it’s a total cop-out, in my opinion and I’m sick to death of hearing it. No, John, people at the time just knew an average film when they saw one, and this is a pretty average story that was seen to similar but superior effect in the first two adaptations of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (based on different source material to “The Thing”, but very similar nonetheless), especially the 1978 version.

For me the film is cut off at the knees by an overly bleak tone and more importantly, the near total lack of character depth. Like “Blade Runner” one is kept at a distance from what might’ve been a workable plot (apparently more closely based on the John W. Campbell story Who Goes There?) by a thoroughly depressing tone, and characters that are not fully-realised enough to get the audience to the point of caring about any of them, let alone the story. Obviously, the film worked for many people, and if this is your thing (sorry, had to say it!), nothing I can say will change your mind. However for me, these two crucial mistakes make the film a tough, uninteresting slog. I get that Carpenter was going for a grim, dark, and claustrophobic approach, but did he also have to make it so unrelentingly dull? Just who is the audience meant to gravitate towards, amongst this pretty dour, and two-dimensional crew? Kurt Russell is one of the more charismatic, likeable, and usually tongue-in-cheek, presences on screen. Not here. Even more so than in Carpenter’s uneven “Escape From New York”, the director has seen fit to drain Russell of any discernible personality or charm whatsoever. He tries his best with what he is given, but his performance is as uninteresting as the character he is playing, which like all the other characters in the film, has little to no back-story. He’s your typical quick-thinking, put-upon hero, but largely an uninteresting one to spend two hours with (He also wears a cowboy hat over a hoodie, for no good reason other than perhaps pay lame tribute to the late western stalwart ‘Gabby’ Hayes or Yosemite Sam).

Just giving us a bunch of 2D guys in a situation that pits them against a seemingly unstoppable force of evil (?) doesn’t immediately endear me to these people. This is a problem I also had with Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (which, like this film is a cold, dour sci-fi/horror hybrid with a strong fan base – though it’s a slightly better film), and something that James Cameron fixed wonderfully with the subsequent “Aliens”, which is everything that “Alien” and “The Thing” are not. I need substance to the characters I’m spending time with. Heck, give me archetypes even, “Aliens” at least gave us recognisable ‘types’ after all. Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster (son of Hollywood legend Burt) can’t even offer up that much depth, so that the roles played by Brimley and Dysart come off as entirely interchangeable, whilst Clennon, Masur (miscast, playing a sour character), and especially poor T.K. Carter (on roller skates!) get saddled with underwritten parts that might as well be called ‘Dope Smoker’, ‘Dog Lover’, and ‘This Film’s Equivalent of J.J. from “Good Times” ’ respectively. Hallahan, meanwhile plays a nearly non-existent character I always forget is even in the movie until, well, you’ll see what happens. The cast is certainly game, notably Dysart and the underrated David (whose role, all things considered, really needed fleshing out too), but Brimley’s the only one other than Russell afforded more than one dimension to play. He’s shown to fairly good advantage, but what’s the point of Wilford Brimley, sans moustache, anyway? (I’m being facetious, don’t worry). I could compare the script and characterisations to such great scripts as “All About Eve” and “12 Angry Men” (the latter of which gave us ‘types’ who nonetheless were brought to life through casting and made entertaining), but instead why not compare it to another Carpenter film, the similarly critically-savaged (and theatrically ignored) “Big Trouble in Little China”? Whatever you might think of that prescient Asian-American, action/comedy/fantasy flick, there is no doubt that it features lively characters, tongue-in-cheek approach, and more importantly, it completely subverts the notion of the hero and the sidekick so that we get archetypal characters with a unique twist. It gave Russell one of his best roles, as the dumb-arse trucker who thought he was the hero, but knocks himself out at the action climax whilst his Asian ‘sidekick’ and accomplices do all the derring-do for him. There is none of this invention in “The Thing” (which is far too slow-paced to be even remotely lively or tense), and being a remake or adaptation is no excuse. This is just truly undernourished, unsatisfactory screenwriting and characterisation wherein Carpenter relies on (at best) stock characterisation with no inversion, subversion, or flavouring whatsoever. It’s just dull, like the tone. The basic plot of this film is as workable as it ever has been, but it’s up to the filmmaker to do something interesting with it, and to populate it with people we want to spend time with. The 78 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” did this- commenting on the social issues of its time, but also giving us memorably quirky characters for idiosyncratic actors Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy to riff on. Carpenter and Lancaster don’t afford their actors with similar groundwork. In fact, the plot and simplistic characters end up resembling a frosty, UFO-tinged variant of the standard slasher film, with characters being stalked and bumped off one-by-one by an evil entity, ala Carpenter’s landmark (and absolutely brilliant) “Halloween”. The only real twist here being that the killer is among them, or to be more precise, is able to duplicate and imitate them. So why should I get caught up in the story, when nothing interesting or unique is going on with it or the characters? There is nothing here that the 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (one of the scariest films ever made) didn’t do a hundred times better. It was an unrelentingly tense film in which menace and oddness crept from every corner of the frame, so you were constantly on edge. This film, by adopting slasher movie conventions is obvious, predictable and tedious.

It’s not just the characters and script that are underdone here. Carpenter went to the trouble of hiring one of cinema’s greatest, most idiosyncratic composers of all-time, Ennio Morricone, composer of many a great spaghetti western score, as well as the memorable music for “The Untouchables”. Morricone needn’t have bothered turning up, because Carpenter clearly wasn’t interested in Morricone bringing anything complex or even identifiably Morricone to the table. In fact, the wholly ineffective, simplistic synth score is so remarkably close to Carpenter’s own forays into such scores, that one might suspect that Carpenter wrote it all himself and merely prompted Morricone to play it from his sheet music. It’s a terribly uninteresting, shockingly unmemorable and simplistic score. Ever seen the video clip for ‘I Ran’ by Flock of Seagulls? I bet Morricone used less fingers to play this music than the lead singer of that shockingly coiffed band’s front man did in the clip! I know Carpenter’s a spaghetti western fan, but why hire Morricone if you’re just going to deliver the same kind of score you yourself do in almost all of your other films (and usually to greater effect, ala “Halloween”)? He’s playing the same one note over and over! I also have to disagree with most people on the cinematography by Dean Cundey, a talented man to be sure (his work in “Halloween” is a textbook on how to do this kind of thing right), but the lighting in this film is particularly terrible. Horror films often need to be dark, but unless you’re going for pitch-darkness (a tool that needs to be employed in more horror films in my view), you obviously want the audience to see what is going on, and Cundey’s murky work most certainly does not help us. It just adds to this film’s inability to bring the audience in, creating a further distance between me and the material. Speaking of distancing, I gotta say I’ve never been a fan of films set in snowy or icy locations, they’re all a bit samey to me and rather dull. “30 Days of Night” is a rare exception, using an unrelentingly cold, dark climate to truly tense, horrific advantage that “The Thing” only wishes it was able to.

I wanted to like this, but Carpenter makes it awfully bloody hard to care about any of it. I did find a couple of worthwhile things in it, though. The film has a really interesting sense of nihilism and hopelessness, especially with its seemingly bleak ending that might just be the boldest thing in the whole film. If you’re gonna go the grim and defeatist route, well you’ve gotta follow through, and at least Carpenter goes all the way with it. Oh, and any film that employs a flame thrower can’t be all bad, in my opinion. We also have the gore. Oh my freaking God, do we ever have the gore.

I will concede like most of this film’s detractors, that the gore and FX work of the wholly underappreciated (and seemingly AWOL) Rob Bottin overwhelms everything else in the film. However, I’m a ‘Glass Half Full’ kinda guy and see fit to praise Bottin’s remarkable (and remarkably disgusting) work as the only damn thing in this film that I find truly notable. There are several bravura FX moments (of the latex variety) that standout, and yes, they clash with the rest of this slow and sour film, tonally, but who cares? The FX are awesome, and if the rest of the film were like these scenes, I’d be singing its praises as a whole. The best thing about Bottin’s work (which are like a swift kick to the head, followed by a punch to the gonads for good measure) is something I’ve always felt was amiss about depictions of aliens. His FX are pretty well unlike anything else before (the 1978 “Body Snatchers” had a similar moment or two, but that’s it) or since (“Hiruko the Goblin” uses the head with spider legs bit, but to a totally different vibe), which is exactly as it should be. Aliens surely must be beyond our wildest comprehension, so why should they look or even operate on any level that we humans actually understand? Bottin’s work (which plays out like an FX guy’s idea of porn) doesn’t follow this theory to the letter, of course, with the alien being a shape-shifter by nature, but there is no doubt that his vision of this alien being is truly imaginative stuff that is quite hard to describe. No matter my feelings on the film as a whole, this alien gets my vote for the most fearsome and imaginative big screen alien of all-time.

A nihilistic attitude and some wildly innovative FX, unfortunately cannot save a largely uninteresting and clichéd film that fails to arouse much interest, thanks to poorly-drawn characters and little of interest anywhere else. Almost everyone else likes it, so don't just take my word for it.

Rating: C