The Thing is a prequel to the 1982 film of the same name, by John Carpenter, which itself was a remake of The Thing From Another World, by Howard Hawks-Christian Nyby. It was released on October 14, 2011. It was written by Eric Heisserer and Ronald D. Moore (who was uncredited, apparently), based on the story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, directed by Matthjis van Heijningen Jr., and stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Eric Christian Olsen.
Let me just say this right off the bat; I haven't seen John Carpenter's version. (Post all insulting and mean comments below.) My apologies, but for this film, I think this works out in a good way. I can judge the film entirely on its own merits.
This film was average. It wasn't horrific, it wasn't phenomenal. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't great. It wasn't bad, it wasn't good. For every good thing about this film, there's a bad thing. And for every bad thing, there's always a good thing. For instance, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, our lead, does a pretty good job. She's playing a female lead in a horror film, who doesn't panic. She keeps her head, and thinks her way through all the crazy stuff happening around her. It's nice to see a strong lead this time around. However, the rest of the cast is nothing spectacular. While I do love Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko on Lost, Simon Adebisi on Oz, one of my favorite tv shows), his role is minimal, and the film could've survived without it. And it is nice to see Joel Edgerton continuing his career, but this film shows nothing special from him, as well as an odd moment for him in the end.
The writing has these nice little moments where it actually makes a good film, particularly a bonus scene shown during the end credits. That was arguably the best part of the film. However, something that is the fault of the writers is the lack of an insane human. Think about it. If a creature were to break free and kill everyone in a base, and could impersonate anyone in the base, don't you think that one of the people there would go crazy? Also, a lot of the side characters remain completely undeveloped, being there only be bodies.
One thing I have constantly heard about Carpenter's version is how spectacular the special effects were, and that not only were they good back then, but they were also good now. The special effects of this film, like the other parts of this film, are both good and bad. The good? The two-headed thing. It looked not only real, but terrifying as well. I was genuinely frightened when this thing was on screen. The bad? The final thing, with its human face. Absolutely fake, and laughable when it first appears. It does lose the face soon enough, but we don't see enough of it, in my opinion. The Thing works best when we see distorted humans, turned into an odd creature. The thing itself, in this film, looks fake and uninspired.
Without spoiling it, I'd like to talk about the one good thing in this film that has no bad thing to counter it: the scene shown in the credits. We get a small amount of character development for one of the better side characters, an interesting, and tense scene (which I imagine directly leads into the original), and something that made me think, "I didn't just waste two hours."
Overall, this film was completely average. I really came out of it thinking "meh," aside from the credits scene, of course. Due to this scene, instead of giving this film an average score of 5, I will give it a slightly above average score of 5.5/10. I recommend this to you if you liked the original so much, that you wanted to know the story behind it. Only in that case, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment