And Another Thing

The reviewers weren't being kind, but I still had to go see The Thing this weekend. John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing is in my top 100, safely far enough up the list that it will probably always be there, so I just couldn't help but want to see what they'd do now, almost 30 years later. It couldn't possibly be good, though, right? Prequel, following up a beloved movie? Recipe for disaster.

I lowered my expectations so much that this movie managed to slip over them. Actually, for the first half of the movie, it cleared my expectations by a fair amount. This new incarnation of The Thing started out with a pretty firm grip on the same sense of paranoia as the first. It had a few standout interesting (and smart) characters. And it seemed to not just rely on CG; there were several actual effects used to portray the creatures, lending the film a faithful continuity with John Carpenter's film.

But it couldn't quite sustain. The roster of characters was a bit too long to make every character matter. CG effects stepped in in increasingly flashier ways; along the way, the psychological thrills gave way to conventional monster movie scares. And the characters stopped acting smart and instead were just lucky enough to keep on surviving. (The ones that did, anyway.)

Making the main protagonist a woman was an interesting choice, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead portrays her well. Concocting another way in which a "thing" might be identified (different from the memorable blood test of the first film) was clever. But ultimately the film gives in to simpler urges and becomes a "run from the killer" movie that is only marginally more interesting for having a more unconventional killer. And of course, there's the problem of all prequels -- that you know exactly where the story has to end up in order to facilitate the beginning of the prior (er, subsequent) story.

Overall, I'd rate the film a C+. It's good enough not to offend you that someone tried to revisit The Thing. But neither is it good enough to truly recommend.