This feeling, a belief that something s amiss just beneath the surface, is one of the driving forces in the film. Once we realize that we re dealing with an alien who can become anything it comes into contact with, we re always on guard just like the characters themselves watching everyone with a great deal of suspicion and always looking for what lurks just outside the range of our normal perceptions. This is perhaps the film s greatest strength that for an hour and forty plus minutes, it draws the viewer into its world an isolated and desolate place and makes us just as paranoid as the people who populate the film. We trust MacReady because, despite his flaws, he seems the most human of the bunch but even that might be a mistake as we re led to suspect everyone at various points in the film. Carpenter s direction is really incredible, probably even more impressive than his work on Halloween .
Carpenter manages to fill every frame of the film with a claustrophobic sense of dread.
Even the shots of the wide-open snowfields seem to close in on you as they run on for miles with no change at all. The actors themselves are a big part of why the film works as well. Wilford Brimley, Charles Hallahan, Keith David, and Richard Dysart all turn in credible performances, as does the rest of the cast. There are no women in this film, which makes for an interesting dynamic there s no need for the cliched love story, and there are no sexual politics to deal with just men trying to kill something that they really can t even comprehend. And while the characters themselves are at least somewhat two-dimensional, they re not the walking cliches that generally populate this kind of film.