A Skillful, Though Far-Fetched and Shallow, Gross-Out Flick

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2010)

John Carpenter exercises as much control over his films as possible. As a pointer to this, many, including The Thing, bear his name as a suffix of sorts in the title. And Carpenter's film relies on its special effects, which are among the most laborious, revolting, and shocking spectacles by its time accomplished by Hollywood's technical wizards. There are times when it appears we are jutting our heads right down into the rancid, gore-gushing jaws of the unidentifiable, as the Thing metamorphoses itself into creatures with the body parts of dogs, men, lobsters, and spiders, all entrenched in gummy intestines. And Jesus, those poor poor dogs. Designer Rob Bottin's work is groundbreaking and extraordinary, yet because it endures in a near abyss in terms of emotional investment, it becomes too aesthetically oppressive and something of an enterprise in abstract art more than film.
A spaceship crash-lands on Earth a zillion years ago and is entombed beneath Antarctic ice. There is an organism in it. It is thawed out and researchers in 1982 are ill-timed in finding out that it has the ability to mimic all life-forms. Its urge to live and enlarge is ravenous. It starts to simulate the sled dogs and then the scientists at a secluded Antarctic research station. The central issue comes to be who is real, and who is the Thing.
This follow-up to Escape from New York is a skillful gross-out flick, hands down, not to mention scored not by Carpenter himself as per his usual but by the great Ennio Morricone, who departs from his usual aesthetic and composes a very low-key pulse to the movie. However, John Carpenter's The Thing is ineffective in two regards: the shallow drama and the far-fetched actions of the scientists on this glacial frontier. Characters have never been Carpenter's forte. He prefers to see us cardiac than see us concerned with the traits of his characters. This time, though, regardless of some pragmatic pigeonholing and some competent boilerplates like the Leader, the Screw-Loose and the Lush, he has occupied his ice station with people whose essential function in life is to be accosted from behind, which is all the more disappointing because he casts some really good character actors like Keith David and Wilford Brimley. The few scenes that foster actual drama are submerged by the scenes in which the men are mere trip wires for a blitz by the Thing.
That brings us to the other problem, credibility. We know that the Thing tends to bide its time until a character is alone, and then ambush, consume and replicate him. Well, the first instinct against this quandary is a padlock buddy system, nevertheless, constantly, Carpenter lets his characters to ramble off alone and return with odd looks on their faces, until we're almost baffled as to who may have been contaminated and who hasn't. At the conclusion of the movie, the survivors ultimately happen upon another whom they all thought before had either died or been contaminated and imitated. Because it had been made clear earlier that the Thing rips through clothing, why their suspicion of whether or not this returning character is real as he is still wearing the same intact clothing as before? I guess one way to look at all this is the obstacle in the way of their survival: the human weakness of constant proclivity for conflict and suspicion keeping them from an obvious goal. But perhaps that takes more than simply letting them disregard the elephant in the room and devolve into slasher film robots.
This ostensible remake is all in all a freak carnival, a make-you-sick movie in which kids on dates can giggle every time there's a scare. There's nothing wrong with that, especially since in that sense, it delivers well. I like being scared and I was scared by various moments in this film. It's readily apparent that Carpenter made his decision at the start to focus on the special effects and engineering and to let the story and people to be a side effect. Since this material has been done before, and to superior effect, as close in release period as Alien in fact, there's no requisite to see this paraphrase except if you are intrigued by what the Thing might look like while starting from slippery, unidentifiable innards then forcing out horrifyingly enormous crab legs and mutating itself into a dog. In which case, see it high.