Ok for a change from the tennis marathon I thought I would do a post on another film, this time its the prequel of the classic 1982 sci-fi horror film, The Thing, which was very much anticipated by fans of the original, so here's more on the plot (SPOILERS ahead!!).
The film starts with a Norwegian survey team out in the Antarctic back in 1982, who come across an alien spaceship embedded deep in the ice. Back in the US, a paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is recruited by Dr Sander Halvorsen (Ulrich Thomsen) and his assistant Adam Finch (Eric Christian Olsen) to go to the Antarctic to investiage the team's findings, to which Kate agrees. On arriving, the Norwegian team show Kate the alien spaceship and also what appears to be a surviving alien which is embedded in a block of ice. The team take the block of ice back to the base, where Sander orders for a tissue sample of the alien to be taken, against the advice of Kate. Later that night the alien bursts free from the block of ice, and soon runs rampant round the camp, and starts to kill off the team members, but they manage to burn it before it kills anyone else. On performing an autopsy on the alien they discover that it has absorbed the team mate Henrik, and Kate suggests that the thing was digesting his cells and trying to shape them to his body. As some of the team leave in a chopper to get outside help, Kate in the base stumbles across some fillings and blood in the shower, she then runs out to wave the chopper down. However as the pilot Carter (Joel Edgerton) turns the chopper back to land, one of the crew turns into a thing and attacks one of the men, the chopper then goes down.
With no way out of the base, Kate tells the others in camp of her theory that the thing is capable of imitating a human being and has presumably already imitated some of the men. Kate suggests that they peform blood tests to check who is human and who isn't, however the test lab is sabotaged. On finding the lab burnt in a fire, Kate then says there is another way to check who's human, as she spotted with the fillings, that the thing is unable to imitate non-organic objects, so she checks the men's teeth to see who has fillings or not. However some members such as Sander and Adam don't have fillings so Kate has them put under watch, but as this happens Carter and Derek return to the base, and they suspected straight away, and the paranoia reaches its limits as the men start to argue with each other, and one of the team Peder, threatens to burn Carter and Derek, but Derek shoots him dead, but Peder's flamethrower pack ignites, which causes an explosion, knocking one of the men, Edvard unconscious, who is dragged into the rec room by the others for treatment, but he then transforms into the thing. In the ensuing chaos the thing assimilates Adam and escapes (this is of course the two headed monster whom we see the burned remains in John Carpenter's film). Later Kate and Carter join forces after burning Derek who was stabbed by one of the thing's tentacles and Jonas who was also infected by one of the thing's tentacles. They try to locate Sander, who has become infected as well, and follow him back to the alien spaceship where they intend to destroy the thing once and for all.
Right off you can't expect this prequel to live up to the expectations of the 1982 classic, but The Thing (2011) is by no means a bad film, in fact I'd almost say it was good. And one of the film's main strengths is the way in which is plots the events that lead up to the Carpenter, and it does it very well. Character wise perhaps though there are too many in the film, way more than in the Carpenter film (where there was only 12), and its hard to identify with them in the same way, as there is no way each character has enough time on screen to be given any development. However Kate as the main character in the film works very well and she is almost like Ellen Ripley, who is thrown into a horrific situation and tries her best to survive it. Although it does make you wonder what happens to her after the end of the film as its almost like she is just a character device for the film, but who knows what becomes of her after, but I'd imagine they are deliberately leaving her fate as being ambiguous.
However if the film does have any flaws then of course it is that for one thing (pardon the pun) its monster CGI effects aren't the best, and while some of them are not bad, overall you just get the Thing is just a samey looking creature, it becomes just a messy mish-mash of limbs and twisted faces, which lacks the gross individuality of the Things seen in Carpenter's film. Also gore wise, the effects don't have an organic feel like Rob Bottin's had, which were dripping deep red goo, blood and guts, which of course is what made the 1982 classic so effective and stomach churning. Here the effects look not too bad, and the two-headed monster is one of the better creature effects in the film, but one at the end is almost laughable (with Sanders head!). And the thing creatures also lack the intelligence and sutble ambiguity of the ones in John Carpetner's movie, as you really don't know who and what sabotages events in 1982 remake, but here the thing is all too quick to reveal itself in its host and from that point of view the creature lacks the same suspense than the remake, as at times its just like another run of the mill monster movie. However the effects team do deserve some credit for their effort in re-imaging the Thing's horrific and ambivalent appearance. And another flaw is in certain scenes it borrows heavily from the 1982 classic, with the blood test, and the scene where they burn the things (done almost in the same style). Also the inside of the thing's spaceship is very similar to the alien spaceship from the film Alien (and interior corridors look almost like the cocooned ones in Aliens!). Nowadays that is something that runs through film franchises, such as Predators and Alien, they just keep borrowing from what went before, which you can expect, but sometimes they can borrow a bit too much.
Performance wise here things (pun again!) aren't too bad, most of the Norwegian crew members are ably performed by the actors. However Mary Elizabeth Winstead's main performance is very good, as she plays Kate Lloyd, nervously at first, but she soon takes charge of the situation, as it all goes thing shaped, and its funny how she has matured nicely since I last watched her in Die Hard 4.0, in short, she's still very nice. By the end you clearly see how she is almost numbed by her experience, after having burned so many infected crewmembers, you just know she will either not escape from there, or if she does, and isn't infected, her life will never be the same.
Score wise just briefly Marco Beltrami, who has scored many films in the past, does a good job here, building up some suspense, and yeah ok there is a little bit of the Ennio Morricone sinister synth also. And the director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. has done a good job in bringing the complicated and creepy beast back to the big screen, and throughout he manages to maintain a fair sense of unease and dread, even though it lacks the overall intensity of the Carpenter film.
Sooooooooo that's it for The Thing analysis, I should really do one for the 1982 version, which it has to be said is far superior. But as far as it goes, The Thing isn't a bad film at all, and its worth a watch, even if you are curious to see it, and if you go into without too much high expectation, then you are sure to enjoy it.
Till then that's it for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment