John Carpenter's masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2002)

John Carpenter reinterprets the 1951 film "The Thing from Another World", hewing more closely to the John Campbell story the movies were based on, and strikes gold. Admittedly, the FX are not the greatest by modern standards, 1982 predated common use of CGI to show us what an alien monster is "supposed" to look like, and the movie may overdo the visuals a little, but Carpenter IS a horror director after all and we pay to see the gore and slime, don't we?
While the story of otherworldly threats to man, particularly those that hide inside people, like Alien, is always good for visceral creep, what really makes The Thing shine is its use and portrayal of psychological fear. Carpenter already has a solid grasp of the tools of the trade, with the creepy Ennio Morricone theme, the frozen, dark wasteland setting outside and the claustrophobic shacks inside, the questions and guesswork he leaves you with to guess at what happened that he didn't show, and has a solid cast including Kurt Russell, Keith David, Richard Masur, Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, Wilford Brimley to work with. But the real effect of this movie is in its portrayal of all too real human fears under such circumstances. The isolation of being stuck on a continent that's a frozen wasteland with only a few people for months, 1000 miles away from aid, an inhospitable and deadly environment outside that forces people into close confines, the manifestations of anxiety, paranoia, cabin fever and how all the characters react differently to it make this movie very accessible and believable. Carpenter could have completely deleted the alien altogether and this would still be an effective scary story about people forced together in an isolated and inhospitable place who begin to turn on each other, something that can and does happen to people in such circumstances.
Kurt Russell does excellently as the macho, practical, "let's find this sucker and get it" protagonist, as does Keith David, whose skeptical, and sees the other men, Russell in particular, as as much of a threat as the alien, Wilford Brimley as the scientist who recognizes the threat before anyone else and is intent on stopping it before it can get out, everyone else be damned.
This is Carpenter's best work to date.