Cinematography was ok, they actually had some cool shots to work with.

This movie, in the almost thirty years since release, has become a critical favorite among the sci-fi horror genre.  It has an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (if you don’t know, that’s pretty good), is in the top 200 on IMDB at 164 and finally received critical acclaim across the board despite poor initial reception.  You can still find haters for this film, but they might fall into the pretentious film snob category.  Which is to be expected from a film that focus’ less on characterization and more on moving along the monster story and showing some pretty darn gruesome effects for its time.  I’ve always been a fan of gore, blame it on seeing Braveheart before I was thirteen if you must, or possible parental issues, but any excess of blood and guts has never bothered me.  Especially older FX that didn’t have computers to help bring the realism out.  So I wasn’t too worried about the supposedly morbid nature of this movie.

The Thing tells the story of an Antarctic research team that is beset by an alien organism that can mimic living organisms that it consumes.  There’s a brief period of exposition followed by some pretty long rising action.  Monster sitings might be scarce, but between those moments the time on screen is used pretty decently as the team falls apart through distrust since one of them might be the thing.  When we do see our blood thirsty alien (who is pretty darn one dimensional in that respect) the film makers made sure to keep the level of gruesome to the highest.  At one point I found myself a bit repulsed, and as my wife commented from the other room, “If you’re disgusted I don’t even wanna know what’s happening.”  Now, recent movies have taken gruesome to new heights, so I almost wish I could go back in time to ’82, forget everything I’ve seen after that year and really experience The Thing for the first time.  I’m guessing it would be pretty epic.

Despite everything I’d heard, read and assumed, this was a good sci-horror for our time.  One issue was that I never actually felt scared during the movie, there was a good amount of suspense waiting for the monster to show itself each time and thrill was present throughout.  But no fear, which is a requirement for any horror/monster movie.  So it was lacking in that department, but as we know these movies are better experienced in the dark rather than pre-afternoon.  Kurt Russel was his common bad-ass character that he played during the 80′s and Keith David did well at concealing whether he was human or not.  The ending is classic, not giving us a bit of closure.  Nope, none at all.  Everything you’d expect in a fairly cliche monster flick.

I would definitely not recommend The Thing to anyone with a weak stomach.  But if you’ve seen any recent slasher movies, enjoy aliens killing pointless characters, the a-typical dysfunctional hero, an abrupt end to the antagonist and the premise of a crashed alien ship dug out of the ice by some Norwegians, then you should definitely see this movie.  If you’ve been following this blog, I’d definitely place it above Eden Log and 2012 on the ‘must see’ list and probably right next to Pandorum but under Moon and Children of Men.  (Links go to my reviews)

John Carpenter directs, a veritable master of horror that does a great job with this remake.  The original came out in 1951.