Very Cool - SPOILERS-

Rating: 9/10 (5 September 2003)

This is one of John Carpenters best efforts and blows away any of his other films that I have seen. In this movie we are treated to some intense, for the time, special effects, and some of the best acting from Kurt Russell ever seen. This is a classic sci-fi/horror movie that takes the original, 1951 The Thing from Another World, to a totally new level. The original is somewhat tame, but really cool B&W 50's monster movie stuff. John Carpenter took this concept and put a few twists around it. In the original a military outpost in the Arctic finds a spaceship complete with alien. They thaw it out and find out that it eats human blood and is part plant and part animal. In the new version, the setting is Antarctica, the group is civilian and the alien is found by a group of 'crazy swedes'. This alien is a little different as well, instead of eating human blood it 'eats' or replicates organic tissue. This makes it a mimic, able to replicate and consume any organism that it has contact with. This leads to suspicion, who is real and who is the thing?, and eventually to murder and complete destruction. My favorite line has to be when the group locks Kurt Russell's character McCready outside in the storm because they think he might be a thing and when he tries to get back in they say, "What if we are wrong? Well then we're wrong." The suspicion between the characters is sometimes palatable and I could feel the isolation and desperation from them.
In the end, the whole camp is destroyed and only two characters are left alive, to slowly freeze to death. And we as the audience are left with the question, are they real or are they the thing? Well done, and one of my favorites. 9 out of 10 due to some poor intial dialog. Also has a great soundtrack.