John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my favourite movies. It's the perfect horror film, full of isolation, paranoia, dread, shocks and a truly great monster. Well crafted characters, top note performances and a classic stalemate ending. Any sequel, prequel or remake was doomed to failure in my eyes then... and yet, I found myself inexplicably drawn to The Thing 2011. In truth, it was much less of a car crash than I expected, but that's not to say I enjoyed it. The best I can say is that it's utterly, utterly pointless. Put that on your poster!
Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s movie is slavishly devoted to Carpenter's. It sticks rigidly to the plot template it established (taking into account the debt Carpenter owed to John W. Campbell's short story "Who Goes There?" and the original 1951 movie Thing From Another World). It's basically a 2 hour love letter to the Carpenter movie, to the point that it makes tremendous efforts in the final credits sequence to set up that film's opening scene. The problem is, it adds very little to the mythology - and take away many of the elements that made Carpenter's version so successful. The scenes aboard The Thing's spacecraft go nowhere and the "Who's got fillings?" inquisition isn't a patch on Carpenter's hot wire in the blood sample sequence. Worse still, it jettisons Carpenter's creepy synthesiser soundtrack in favour of orchestral overkill... something that's brought home in the epilogue when they finally dig out the synths to evoke the original. The CGI, meanwhile, could have been a whole lot more gratuitous... but it still couldn't hold a candle to Stan Winston.
The cast do their best, yet cute and spunky as Mary Elizabeth Winstead may well be, she's no Kurt Russell. Hey, I don't know, maybe if you've never seen the Carpenter version then the 2011 Thing might have something for you. It's not a bad movie... it just doesn't make any effort to justify its own existence. It may be a carbon copy, but it ain't nothing like the real Thing...
