Well, it's certainly SOME thing.

Rating: 8/10 (30 October 2011)

"You'll never, ever, see anything like The Thing again." -John Carpenter, 1997.
He's absolutely right. No one would have the nerve to make a film as disgusting as this in the current "let's not offend anybody at all, ever" climate. Without a single frame of CGI, the Thing shoves our faces right into Rob Bottin's gruesome make-up effects and proves that genuine, tangible prosthetics and monsters are a million times scarier than a cheap, obvious effect done on a computer in post-production.
I don't understand why people keep referring to this as a remake. It's far, far removed from Howard Hawks' version. Even Carpenter himself, a Hawks admirer, says that The Thing is it's own movie, and much closer to the original novella 'Who Goes There' by John W. Campbell Jnr.
Set in the lonely Antarctic, The Thing takes the form of a wolf and bounds across the snowscapes to a US research station, pursued by frantic, half-mad Norwegians. Unable to communicate with the English-speaking American team they end up dead before being to warn them that the cuddly dog is actually a hideous shape-shifting monster. The team eventually discover the wreck of an alien spaceship that has been entombed in the ice for at least 100, 000 years before the monster begins to wreak havoc at the research station, intent on consuming all of the humans and making it to civilization where it can take over the entire planet.
Fear and paranoia grow among the team as they desperately try to prove who is biologically human and who has been assimilated by The Thing. It's utterly horrific stuff, but it's not without its illogical moments and massive plot holes. The universal adoration of The Thing seems to forget that it doesn't make complete sense. Carpenter admits he lost track of who is and who isn't, which seems kinda lazy. Ambiguity can be a cheap way of maintaining uncertainty and Carpenter should have delivered a more focused and precise plot. Plus the paranoia was way overdone. By the halfway mark I reckon the fear among the men should have been merely implicit rather than verbally delivered at every opportunity.
It's rather strange, and fitting, that this movie also comes across as a big-screen adaptation of HP Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness', which also features research scientists in Antarctica discovering an ancient shape-shifting lifeform and losing their sanity.
Despite the problems, this is Carpenter's direction at its best, with long, slow, tracking cameras in gorgeous anamorphic Panavision, evocative lighting, and lonely minimalism. Even Ennio Morricone's score is very much restrained. The cast have their defining features mostly hidden beneath thick facial hair, but Kurt Russell once again proves why he is Carpenter's favorite lead, and the awesome Keith David provides plenty of badassness just with his mere presence.