A stomach-turning mess

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 2011)

A motley band of Americans stationed at a lonely outpost base in Antarctica inadvertently find themselves sheltering a monstrous shape-shifting alien, which can assume their identities, leading to rampant showdowns and paranoia.
The 1951 version of The Thing does not just rank as one of my favorite horror films, but one of my favorite all-time films period. So watching director John Carpenter take a glorified crap on it does not rank highly on my entertainment scale, but alas that is exactly what he does. Amazingly this fetid remake has some sort of cult following that has developed over the years, but I am at a loss at to why, unless they are gore-seekers salivating over the next slimy effect to splash across the screen.
I gather that this film version adheres more closely to the source novel "Who Goes There?", but that only serves to show that original filmmakers Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby and company knew what they were doing when they abandoned it. Other than the bleak snowbound setting, there is nothing especially notable or compelling about this film. Fans seem to be reading much more depth into it than ever appears on screen or in the writing. The "are you human or a monster" bit had already been done to death long before this film hit the screen and was fully realized in far better films, primarily Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which had also received an effective and chilling modernization just a few years previously.
A big part of the problem with focusing on this paranoia approach is that in the Invasion films, the characters were developed capably and were sufficiently sympathetic enough to warrant concern when they succumbed to the Body Snatchers. Here, the characters are humorless, dull and unsympathetic. We cannot tell who is human or alien because none of them seemed particularly human from the start. Whereas the Hawks original populated the base with a believable, appealing and often amusing gallery of people to be terrorized, Carpenter provides us with paper-thin monuments to testosterone that test patience. None of them are likable or worth investing much concern in. Perfectly solid actors like Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Donald Moffat, etc., have little to do but glare at each other and pose in manly fashion.
Lead Kurt Russell can be a solid actor as well, but director Carpenter never seemed able to bring out his best, eliciting performances that either seem to be tiresomely buffoonish (Big Trouble in Little China) or a catatonic rendition of a low-wattage Clint Eastwood (here and Escape from New York).
With the story and characters completely underwhelming, Carpenter tries to make up the difference with a repellent cabinet of curiosity gore effects that do nothing but demonstrate that energy that should have been directed to more meaningful areas was squandered in trying to make the viewer puke. The budget for blood, pus, ooze, slime and innards must have been astronomical.
Even worse, Carpenter's direction itself is inert. The film has virtually no suspense or forward momentum - it lurches like a drunk from one set piece to the next, scored by yet another one of Carpenter's overly synthesized dirges. I cannot recall one extended suspense sequence in the entire film that raises the pulse even minimally. And anyone waiting for a blow-out climax will be surprised by the vague, low-key final moments in which Carpenter caps the film. A more unsatisfying climax is hard to imagine.
The film also provides evidence of why it is a blessing that Carpenter has refrained from directing for a number of years. After first-rate work on the deservedly legendary Halloween and the underrated The Fog, Carpenter repeatedly provided ambitious concepts done in by almost spectacularly lackluster execution, to the point where it seemed as though a rank amateur was responsible. The Thing and Escape from New York certainly marked the beginning of this decline.
Misguided fans like to say that this film was overlooked in 1982 (like the similar Blade Runner) because it was lost in the success of E.T. Sad to tell them, but Blade Runner had a following as early as 1982. The Thing, at the time, was a box office dud and critically dismissed as a botched remake that functioned as little more than a effects freak show. That description still holds true several decades later. Genre fans can keep this stinkbomb, I will head back to the company of original and its much-deserved classic status.