The Thing | Film review

Creature features lost something special when Hollywood started making monsters out of ones and zeroes instead of latex and hydraulics. Take the titular menace of John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing. As designed by F/X wizard Rob Bottin, with a little assistance from Stan Winston, the hideous beast looked like a car accident with teeth—all squirming entrails and pulsating viscera. It might have crawled straight out of your worst nightmare, except that there was also something moistly, unpleasantly organic about it. It almost looked real, for lack of a better word.

The same can’t really be said for the insidious intruder that slinks and scurries and crab-walks through this new version. On paper, it’s the same unholy creation, a shape-shifting alien parasite with the ability to mimic the appearance of any organism it encounters. Yet no mouse-click technician can replicate the ingenuity of Bottin’s design; here, the flesh-splitting transmutations look like common CGI parlor tricks. As with everything else in this slick rehash, they’re the handiwork of a skilled imposter.

Variously resembling a prequel, a remake and a remake of a remake, 2011’s The Thing takes us back to just before the events of its predecessor, zeroing in on the Antarctic research team that accidentally unleashes the extraterrestrial terror. Except for a Jurassic Park–style prologue in which a team of American scientists is assembled and helicoptered in, the film closely mirrors the architecture of its ’80s ancestor. As before, the real horror stems less from the sight of a thrashing, mutating monstrosity than from the distrust and paranoid dread the alien’s master-of-disguise routine inspires. The famous “test” scene, tweaked only slightly here, remains a seat-gripping highlight.

It’s worth remembering that the ’82 Thing was itself a remake, based on both 1951’s The Thing from Another World and John W. Campbell’s classic novella Who Goes There? Carpenter’s version remains a model worth studying—less an imitation than a glorious reinvention. This new Thing, by contrast, only fares well when sticking to Carpenter’s template. A late-film trek through a downed UFO evokes, however accidentally, this summer’s Cowboys & Aliens. Now there’s an organism you’re better off not mimicking.