UK Release Date: 02-12-2011
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr
Country: USA
Distributor: Universal

It’s hard to overstate the impact of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing, with its evocative and creepy Antarctic setting, its disturbingly minimal Morricone score, its slow-burning ramping up of paranoia and claustrophobia and, of course, its envelope-busting special effects that did things to dogs and humans you’d never thought possible.

Impossible too, I suppose, to recapture the kind of excitement the film generated among its original audiences (I went to see it twice the week it came out, so gobsmacked was I). Hollywood seems perpetually desperate to pull off such a feat in its frenzy of remaking, rebooting and recycling, but the end results rarely recapture the spirit of the originals so much as simply reshuffle their DNA into some awful, shambling parody of a proper movie, an ersatz abomination far easier to spot than the horrifying shape-shifter of Carpenter’s classic film.

The makers of this latest ‘re-imagining’ (as such things are laughingly called) know full-well the huge affection in which The Thing is held, and have tried (JJ Abrams-like) to dodge the ire of geeks by ‘respecting’ Carpenter’s film and opting for a prequel rather than a remake.

Sounds like a smart move, until you realise some of the problems you’ve just set yourself. It was the Norwegians who got to the alien spaceship first and unleashed its long-slumbering inhabitant (just like they got to the South Pole first, so it jolly well serves them right). So, problem number one is that anyone who has seen Carpenter’s The Thing knows exactly what is going to happen, just not precisely how (this qualifies as fanboy fun, though, as we oldsters can enjoy seeing just how cleverly the prequel sets up the film we know and love and catalogue each continuity hit or miss with obsessive glee).

The second problem, of course, is that you’ve just saddled yourselves with a film in which all the characters are Norwegian; this might play well in certain parts of Minnesota but is a headache, really, as no-one in Hollywood cares about Norwegians very much.

This one was quickly solved by our clever film-makers, using that tried-and-tested Hollywood solution: parachute in some proper Americans to sort everything out. Easy.

Except it isn’t, and, as a result, the film goes off the boil within five minutes. Part of the genius of Carpenter’s original is its utter commitment to the dramatic unities: the action unfolds over a short space of time in one setting and has no distracting subplots. Its icy, paranoid grip is not for one moment relaxed. Its world, for the duration of the film, is the world, and we are as trapped in it as the rapidly diminishing cast of characters.

This time around, after a sort of scene-setting prologue in which some Norwegians (speaking pesky Norwegian, necessitating subtitles) run into big trouble in their little tractor, we are whisked off to nice, normal America where an implausibly young and pretty girl palaeontologist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is implausibly offered the chance to be in on the find of the century by a mysterious Norwegian and his equally implausibly good-looking American research assistant, who looks like he’s stepped out of a knitwear catalogue (useful, really, as we know where he’s going). Thus, the spell is broken; the mere glimpse of a busy outside world, easily and quickly reached by plane, is enough to ensure that when we do return to the icy Antarctic wastes, along with a helicopter full of no-nonsense Yanks, we do so as tourists, not residents.

From this point on, the film does exactly what you’d expect, returning to the Hawks/Nyby The Thing from Another World for the saucer discovery and thawing out and escape of the alien horror, then essentially following the outlines of the Carpenter version (I mean, what do you think is going to happen once the creature is loose?), right down to a retread of the blood-test scene (although this time involving checking for dental fillings instead).

There are some enjoyable effects; the blend of old school prosthetics and CGI mostly works, as does a nod here and there to the 1982 film’s ‘look’. But, 30 years on, there’s no way these sequences can achieve the mind-boggling, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” impact of the original.

There are also, in place of Carpenter’s quickly and effectively sketched character types, just too many damned people in this film. Far from being lonesome and a long way from home, this research station is packed to the gills – mostly, of course, with cheerful (well, not for long) Norwegians – hulking men with beards and woolly hats who are, frankly, indistinguishable from one another; so why should we what happens to them? Or to the intrusive but equally dull Americans? Winstead’s can-do, ass-kicking scientist ticks all the final girl boxes well enough, but adds no quirks or insights to the template; she’s no substitute for Kurt Russell either.

And, finally, the much-vaunted desire to link this new Thing with the old one (yes, it ends with a dog being chased by a helicopter) also fails – inexplicably, really – by simply not bothering to fill in a few important details, thus satisfying no one. Carpenter’s The Thing was a clever, stripped down and terrifying updating of a loveable, yet talky, 1951 classic; it brought new ideas and new scares to the table. The 2011 Thing has neither ideas nor scares to offer us.

That’s not to say it’s all bad – just empty-headed, tension-free, formulaic and pointless; and it’s really just a remake without the balls to admit it.