Simply even considering to remake John Carpenter’s “The Thing” requires balls: Huge, massive, dangerously swollen, ‘please-see-a-doctor’ balls. The kind that can’t be contained by underwear and need to be carried around on a silver platter by a pair of dwarves in tiny tuxedos because Carpenter’s “The Thing” isn’t the kind of film that can be easily improved upon or even replicated.
A straight-forward remake isn’t going to work so, in effect, you need to take the concept into a totally new direction or just say, “Screw it” and turn the whole thing into a “Naked Gun”-style parody movie. Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen attempts neither with his bland and unasked for version of “The Thing.”
Starting off with a sequence that recalls the opening of “The Thing from Another World,” a Norwegian expedition finds a wrecked spaceship and its alien pilot frozen in the Antarctic. From there, a group of American researchers led by paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead who, on one hand, it’s nice to see starring in a movie but on the other, isn’t exactly believable as a no-nonsense badass) is called in to assist with the discovery.
What they find out is that the alien (or is it aliens? The film is never clear about this) isn’t dead, but merely resting and slowly starts to take over the bodies of the various researchers (who for some reason or another all resemble Liam Neeson in an obscenely fake beard). With no obvious clues to separate the infected from the uninfected, the alien(s) could be anyone.
Ostensibly a prequel to the 1982 original, the 2011 version of “The Thing” is, in reality, an indifferently lensed remake that makes very little effort to differentiate itself from its inspiration. And whenever it does attempt to step out of the shadows of its predecessor, it usually comes off as uninspired. For example, in Carpenter’s movie, the test the characters used to discover the alien involved a jumping blood sample. The 2011 version of this scene basically amounts to Winstead shining flashlights into people’s mouths.
“The Thing” lacks a distinct identity of its own, often falling into the same traps that have plagued many mediocre genre movies over the past 10 years. The characters are interchangeable and indistinguishable, there’s an abundance of fake scares that exist solely to get a cheap jolt from the audience and — in the most disappointing development — the aliens are all rendered in unconvincing CGI effects.
Apart from the underdeveloped, illogical storyline (What exactly were the alien’s motivations? If he wanted to simply return to his spaceship, why did he waste his time murdering all those people when he could’ve disguised himself as his first victim and escaped without anyone being the wiser?), the unappealing CGI effects are the most annoying aspect of the 2011 film and lack the gooey, organic realness of the prosthetic effects found in the original.
But for all of its faults, “The Thing’s” greatest crime against cinema-nity lies in the fact that nobody from the 1982 version of “The Thing” appears in a brief cameo. Not Kurt Russell, not Wilford Brimley, not even the sassy black guy on roller skates. And really, if you’re not willing to throw the sassy, black guy on roller skates even the tiniest bone, then you deserve to be beaten by a Julianne Hough movie at the box office.
Rating: W
| Tweet | Follow @wkdr |
|
|
