THE THING (1982)
So good, it's...it's...wow
I normally don't write reviews of movies I've seen numerous times - I fear I'll start gushing. But when I got me the widescreen copy of this movie the other day, and also found myself with no movies rented out from the store, I decided to jot one down for this baby. I wrote a paper on this movie for a course on Science Fiction I took a few years ago, and strangely, got a lower mark than the paper I wrote on the awful Men Of Respect. Same professor, too. I don't get it. Ah, well.
Bottom line - The Thing has been my favorite monster movie since I first caught it on late-night TV when I was about twelve. (the tape cut off just when MacReady said "We'll wait. See what happens." And it was until I rented it a couple of years later that I believed I somehow missed the ending) Loaded to the gunnels with suspense, gore, effects, shocking moments and just plain overall creepiness, it works simultaneously as a film on its own, a more faithful adaptation of John W. Campbell's short story "Who Goes There?", and a sequel to the Hawks film (if we can suspend enough disbelief to modify a big number of things about that film).
The film opens with a helicopter chasing a sled dog in the Antarctic. (in winter, no less, meaning that any day now they're gonna have 23-hour nights) They're jabbering in Norwegian, they're very angry and violent (shooting and throwing grenades at this dog), and they've obviously been cooped up in this frozen prison for a long, long time. No, they're not in Emperor - they're just the last surviving members of their camp, and something ain't quite right about that dog.
They chase it all the way to the nearby American camp and, and quickly die. (one of them hilariously blows himself up - if you don't blink, you can see the poor bastard go zooooooom up through the rotor blades) And the dog is taken in by the American camp, where it quickly reveals itself to be a nasty, slimy, shape-changing alien organism that can, given time, perfectly imitate any unlucky bastard it's left alone with.
The cast is uniformly excellent - while Kurt Russell's MacReady is the only character that's drawn with any detail, the rest of the cast interacts with each other beautifully, and they well illustrate the growing tension in the camp even without the intrusion of the organism. This is not a group of genial men who start eyeing each other with suspicion, as they were in the short story - this is a bunch of people who have been so isolated with each other for so long that they're on the verge of killing each other anyway. This isn't explicitly shown until the organism is introduced, but it's slyly hinted at (like when one guy says that another man - who brought a handgun, for some reason - was "...just dying for a chance to use his popgun!" when more likely, they all wanted a chance to use it).
Russell turns in one of his best performances as MacReady. When we first meet him, he's cranky to the point of foolishness (he pours J&B into the chess computer, pretty much depriving himself of a playing partner for the rest of the year), he's isolated himself even more than the others have, and if he's not an alcoholic yet then he's well on his way. But when the shit comes down, he turns out to be the best asset the men at this camp have - strong, clever as hell, and completely unafraid to be a vicious tyrant if that's what it takes for the group to stay alive.
This is one of John Carpenter's most accomplished movies, unsuccessful at the box office originally, but finding a dedicated audience over the past seventeen years. It was filmed in British Columbia and Alaska, but he captures the isolation of an Antarctic setting well. This isn't like in the original film, where they're a short plane ride away from the nearest town - they may as well be on another planet. Ennio Morricone's score isn't always great, but it usually helps jack up the creepiness of it all.
Rob Bottin's creature effects have been accused of running amuck and becoming the whole point of the movie, but I would strongly disagree. The point of the effects is to shock, not only on a simple, jump-out-of-your-seat level, but in the sense that the viewer has absolutely no idea how the creature is going to show itself next, or what it's going to do when it does. Jaws open up in one man's chest and much off somebody's arms. A head splits into two rows of teeth, which grab one poor guy and starts flinging him around. Another head just falls off, only to grow big spider legs and scuttle away. These are great effects, which are still much admired, but the point is, they WORK. They firmly establish what this creature is and what it's capable of.
The movie has a good sense of humor (largely thanks to one guy who brought enough pot to choke the big space slug that tried to eat the Millennium Falcon), very sparsely used, which was a wise decision from writer Bill Lancaster. More comic relief than this movie had would have greatly reduced its effectiveness. It's also got as much grue as you're likely to see from an R-rated movie (Carpenter has, numerous times, relayed the story of how having a big studio backing him up got this an R when an independent feature would easily have received an X).
If there's any real weakness in The Thing, it's the logic of the story. Any viewer trying to piece together just who was infected and when it could have happened is simply going to come to naught. When a locker full of blood is broken into and sabotaged, we're given a clear outline of pretty much the only way it could have happened, but it turns out that it didn't happen that way. And no clue is given as to just how it DID happen. The monster's first appearance culminates in the escape of a big, big chunk of Thing, which nobody mentions for the rest of the movie, even though they all saw it. They're all worried about each other - what about that big chunk of Thing outside? (the novelization includes a scene were MacReady and one other guy - I don't remember who - are attacked by such a Thing from under some ice while they go out snowmobiling somewhere. Whether that was supposed to be the same chunk or not, I don't remember) And just what's the deal with Wilford Brimley's character? How...when...what the hell?
Still, to harp on the logic of the story would be to sadly miss the point of all this. This is as good as a paranoid thriller gets, well-made on every front. And if you haven't seen it already, go see it NOW or check yourself in to a psychiatrist, because there's obviously something wrong with you.
Followed by a two-issue comic book series which wasn't bad, and ended (somehow) even more bleakly than the movie did.