Boring

Rating: 2/10 (30 March 2008)

Don't let the extremely high rating here on IMDb fool you, this movie does not deliver. It honestly did nothing but bore me the entire time. The movie starts off slow, and never really gets going. There's no character development with any of the characters sans Kurt Russell, and the movie relies on Gore & special effects for it's scares. Trust me when I say there's absolutely nothing suspenseful about this movie, and the paranoia theme doesn't work here. What we basically get is some shape shifting Alien that apparently was frozen for thousands of years, which apparently a group of Norwegians was able to carry to their base, which then escaped and started attacking the group of Americans. That's the plot right there. What it does is it basically stays hidden as a dog for a very long time, apparently not in the mood to make it's attack, and only gets caught because apparently the sounds of dogs barking annoys it enough. And let's not forget how the seemingly immortal Shape Shifting Alien dies in such a laughably easy manner. Kurt Russell and his crew spend the entire time burning it down, and yet it somehow still finds a way to survive, making it seemingly immortal. Then at the end Russell blows it up easily with a stick of dynamite, which for some reason he never thought of doing before. We also have no idea what happens to the Nauls character, as he just disappears into oblivion. Apparently his character wasn't needed anymore, so the makers of this film decided to get rid of him by sending the character to go investigate something he saw, even though the character Nauls knows there's an Alien out there waiting to take over his body. Honestly, what sense does that make? That part right there was very poorly written. As to the ending, it really makes no sense because it features Russell's character and Childs sitting there wondering if each one is possibly The Thing, despite Russell just recently killing it. And if either one was The Thing, why didn't it attack the other? Why sit there drinking whiskey with a human when you could easily finish him off? It makes no sense to me. Also, neither apparently care to leave the freezing area, apparently leaving us to believe they both just die there. Anyway, the only points I give this movie for is the special effects, and the atmosphere. The location of Antarctica was fantastic, and the special effects for it's time were astounding. Other then that, this movie is poorly written and really boring. Pass on it, 3/10.