David O'ConnellThe Thing
October 24th 2011 04:19
Though still a visceral variation on themes of paranoia and distrust, Matthijs van Heijningen’s remake-cum-prequel of The Thing lacks the allegorical heft and flat-out genius of John Carpenter’s 1982 version, a film that has aged like a fine wine. Special effects maestro Rob Bottin’s ground-breaking designs are exchanged for a truckload of CGI working overtime to enlace the frosty terrain of Antarctica with Norwegian blood; the fun factor isn’t entirely eliminated but the organic inventiveness most definitely is.
Joel Edgerton almost reluctantly assumes semi-lead duties as a pilot called into action once a scientific base camp is infiltrated by an alien specimen overjoyed to be dug up from its icy entombment, but this is no actor’s showcase. The feisty Mary Elizabeth Winstead has but a handful of scenes to show off her palaeontologist character’s backbone against the spiking testosterone fear ratio around her; everyone else is background fodder, leaving an ensemble herd to queue up for sacrificial duties as the Thing exchanges one guise for another in its single-minded quest for carnage.
To damn it with faint praise, this third incarnation of John W. Campbell Jnr.’s original story at least doesn’t count as a total disaster. With all memory of Carpenter’s film erased from your mental slate, it’s even possible to enjoy this - hopefully - final incarnation which can be accurately distilled into a generic monster-on-the-loose adventure.
That classic Carpenter set-piece, the blood test scene, gets neatly substituted for a dental examination – a cruel trick that will raise a smirk for daring to raise our expectations before shooting them down with a far less tense substitution.
The falsest note comes in the extended final sequence which ventures back into the Thing’s spaceship; the unnecessary technological perspective taints the sense of dread and modernises an opponent that we associate with primal survival instincts.
Composer Marco Beltrami uses Ennio Morricone’s frigid heartbeat motif as a framing device and nod to what is an iconic score, but his original work feels unusually uninspired, with only an occasional flash of originality seeping through the dense atmospheric gloom.
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