The Thing

The Thing is not a bad movie. A useless film? Yes, but not a bad film. Well, not exactly. The director has a flair for the right horror atmosphere, helped by a more than good score by Marco Beltrami and a bunch of special effects artists who did an amazing job (seriously, because they combined state-of-the-art digital effects with excellent models and masks in a way that would make Stan Winston rejoice). It's worse with the film’s lousy script. The people who wrote it, in my opinion, let themselves get too tied up with the fact that they were writing a prequel and that they had to follow the original film with so many things (the axe in the wall, the ice "sarcophagus", the two-headed monster, the dog, the polar bear with his throat cut...) that they forgot about originality. Alas. I liked the beginning of the film, which honored the short story template, I liked ideas like the one with the seals and just about every scene with The Thing in action, but I still felt like I was watching something I'd already seen once before that had "only" been dressed up in a fancier coat. I was also sad to see how the script flubbed the characters (most of them are easily confused individuals) and several times also the logic (the helicopter crash and who survived it). Still, I was not offended by the new version of The Thing and I would not dare to give it less than a slightly above average three stars. (01/31/2012)

An unoriginal and incredibly austere prequel that, while it delights with its return to a chilling setting and a detailed development of the plot concept with deep respect to the legendary first film, is not worth much as a standalone film/horror work. Carpenter had compelling characters and a psychologically exceptional script within the genre, which wrapped all that horror and depression even tighter in a unique survival drama. Heijningen's characters are bland, and there are so many that we barely have time to get truly attached to any of them, and the script is a wild parade of slightly over-digitised monsters and a bunch of clichés typical of modern blockbuster sci-fi horror. The Thing had a perfect atmosphere of isolation and despair, and managed to terrify even with simple but super-clever story motifs (the examination of drawn blood with a hot wire); here, such innovation and ideas are sorely lacking, and each appearance of the monster, however visually striking, is nowhere near suggestively shocking enough to truly unsettle us. And also, the original had a brilliant soundtrack that made the blood run cold, while the sequel boasts a soundtrack as mediocre as the vast majority of its genre peers.... It's not a dud if we, as fans of The Thing, appreciate Heijningen's nostalgic wink to the past, or rather the future, culminating in the awesome closing credits, but given the plot it should have been much better... (01/03/2012)

It's not bad, just completely useless, because the space that the prologue of the first film leaves open is unreasonably narrow for a prequel. In addition, the filmmakers are far too respectful and self-confident, thereby creating something on the edge between a prequel and a remake, which fails due to the inability to evoke the chilling and depressing atmosphere of the original film, but also that they opted for a female protagonist, thus pushing The Thing closer to Alien, which is a type of horror from which Carpenter's opus differs mainly in its focus on collective psychology and a paranoid atmosphere. Heijningen Jr. stayed in the middle - he didn't ruin anything, and he didn't create anything... I don't understand why the sequel in the style of the excellent PC game The Thing wasn't filmed. That has much greater potential... (12/13/2011)

Matthijs van Heijningen (fuck how does he expect to get into the subconscious with that name) may have played Silent Hill and Dead Space and enjoyed watching Hellraiser, so it’s kind of a shame he hasn't seen the original The Thing he was prequelling. An horror movie utterly devoid of ambition where nothing works apart from the two creatures, and it's distressing to watch the film try to pretend it’s not the case. The CGI is terribly boring, the characters are as flat as Milla Jovovich, instead of a final climax we get a routine visit to a spaceship (incidentally, the fact that the hole to it was supposed to be blown by the Norwegians is somewhat forgotten), and whereas in the original the space nastiness was rather sneaky and insidious, here it rearranges rooms with the nonchalance of the Hulk. Puke up and forget. (11/20/2011)

Even in a generally good film, we often see unused potential, that magical “something” in the background, whether an idea, a thought or a hint that could have turned that good film into an unforgettable masterpiece – if its creator had grasped the essence of the story correctly, dispensed with all of the clichés and tried-and-tested formulas and gone his own way. That’s just the kind of unexploited potential I would have picked up on in Heijningen’s film today if John Carpenter hadn’t perfectly put it to use before him. Carpenter’s version was an intimate drama built into a terrifying horror flick through the creeping fear of an unidentifiable evil. Heijningen’s digital freakshow is neither intimate nor a drama; it is more literal, faster, more epic and more riddled with clichés. In spite of that, however, it worked decently for me, thanks to the brilliant idea that Carpenter embedded in my childhood nightmares, and thanks also to the few new ideas that elevated it from the position of parasitic plagiarism to the role of dignified film fiasco. I consider the emancipatory change of protagonist from the ’80s action hero (Kurt Russell) to an intelligent woman, dentist Mary Elizabeth Ripley, to be one of those good ideas. And I give thanks for the closing credits ;-). (11/20/2011)