Thrilling and intelligent, though some loose ends and missing explanations.

Rating: 7/10 (23 April 2004)

Carpenter is one of a king when it comes to movies, he does his thing here with some well done directing that really grabs to your back and hangs on, the silent scenes of the long halls only supported by gothic and mysterious music are definetely the best side of this movie, silence can scare.
The movie follows a group stationed at a research facility in the antharctica (Spelled correctly? Probably not :), one day two men arrives in a helicopter apparently hunting a dog, they appear crazy and are shooting at the dog without thinking, after hitting one of the men of the facility they shoot the strangers. After going through the information gained from their corpses they travel to their camp and discovers it more or less ruin and burned out, returning to their home they put the strange dog into the kennel where it kills the other dogs and turns out as a monster, an investigation is set upon and the dead dog is investigated, it shows that the dog was controlled by an organism able to imitate other organisms to create a perfect copy, from here, the movie begins.
Carpenter showed with Halloween already that his is one hell of a horror director, his strength is that he goes for psychological horror mixes only by a little gore, i hate the gore part of horror movies as it often appears un interesting and in the long run just plain boring, but Carpenter does this differently, he doesn't show to much of it, but still a little to disgust us, his unique style, that has however been copied a few times, is shown very pure here, with the many silent runs through the slim corridors, down creepy halls, with the classic horror music pumping through your vanes.
The acting is pretty good, i wouldn't say that there are any of these that does a terrific job, i didn't feel that way at least, there are many main characters, which makes it a little confusing and also hard for one individual to stand out, even if Kurt Russell has the main part, they're all a bit above average but all fades a little to the background as there are so many different persons to focus at.
Even though this is without a doubt one of the classic and memorable psychological terror movies, there is no doubt that it is flawed as well as beautiful, there are several loose ends and just generally things that i felt could have been explained better, in the start of the movie it paces very fast through the start of the movie, where i would have preferred a slower introduction that explained better what was really going on, but later on the story sums up rather nicely and does create a rather thrilling and entertaining movie.
7/10