Superior to the original - Carpenter's best movie, hands down

Rating: 10/10 (15 September 2005)

I find it quite remarkable that Christian Nyby's The Thing From Another World (1951) is always held up as an all-time towering sci fi classic, yet when viewed against John Carpenter's 1982 'remake' it is blatantly clear which version has the edge...and how *bad* the 51 movie actually is. I saw Carpenter's movie long before I saw Nyby's, so maybe that is why I'm biased towards the former, but let's face it, people, the original film is stagy, badly acted and horribly overrated. On the other hand, Carpenter's film is edgy, paranoid, brilliantly shot and perfectly performed. I'm not being paid to say this, my friends; like Mr Tarantino, I freakin' LOVE this movie.
I suppose it helps that Carpenter actually chose to do an adaption of the source novella, Who Goes There?...Nyby's movie is really nothing like the book at all. William Campbell's often tripped-out 1938 story has been translated by Carpenter into an artifact of its' early 80s era. That is to say, plenty of gore, post-Watergate world-weary 'heroes' who react instinctively rather than earnestly, and a distinct lack of hope. One might almost call it the welcome antidote to the mawkish saccharine (another and wholly opposite facet of the early Reagan era) that was The Thing's box office opponent, ET.
Carpenter in The Thing is light years from the rubbish he'd trot out after his last truly great movie, Prince Of Darkness (though In The Mouth Of Madness was a rare return to form amidst some truly lousy movies from Mr C). Here, he's the youthful, edgy, guerilla filmmaker with a touch of stoned poetry that made him the cult icon he is today. The direction is sparse but deft, showing great economy of movement and some of the best examples of 'directing lots of people in a tight space' work I have ever seen. Carpenter knows when to not direct and just let scenes play - he makes you think you are watching a tape of true events at times, just as our heroes do at one point in the story.
And it's genuinely *scary*, too. Our scruffy band of Antarctic outpost scientist heroes are confronted by and trapped with a defrosted alien menace that can imitate any life form it encounters...and imitate it so perfectly that it seems that even the duplicates don't know they're duplicates. Our characters are forced into a nightmare where paranoia is actually a virtue, where you can literally trust no-one. There's one thing the creature wants, and that is to reach a populated area and begin an infection that could swamp the entire human race in just 27,000 hours....
The oft-mentioned gore is pretty extreme, and there are numerous examples of sheer gross-out body horror. The most famous example has to be *that* bit with the defibrillator paddles- oh God, that bit made me jump out of my skin the first time I saw it. Leonard Maltin might claim that the 'non-stop parade of icky effects' are off-putting, but the grossness of the effects is the *whole point*, Lenny! This creature literally devours a victim, absorbs its' DNA and changes into the victim! To show this process as anything other than flat-out crunch-and-splatter would be..well, silly.
Kurt Russell gives the performance of his career here as our hero, Macready; a shaggy-haired, alcoholic, sombrero-wearing chopper pilot who's the only one of our isolated protagonists who realises the truth -that survival is all that matters - in time to save himself. But that's not to say that the rest of the cast are slackers; each of the other 11-odd people in the all-male cast are top-notch. Wilford Brimley excels as the doomladen Blair, Keith David's his usual great self, and a nicely cast-against-type Donald Moffatt (remember him from Logan's Run: The Series?) gets the film's best line when he's tied to a chair.
And who can go past Ennio Morricone's music? It's one of his last scores, and one of his best...a moody, pulsating collection of mainly bass tones that serves the same function as Bernard Herrman's slashing strings in Psycho - to heighten the palpable sense of unavoidable doom.
There is literally NOTHING wrong with this movie, folks. Not a single false step in the whole flick - even the so-called 'cop-out' ending is perfect. It is up there with Alien and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers '78 as one of the three best sci fi horror movies of all time. Forget the RKO original, because it really is not very good at all. THIS, though, this is the stuff.