The Thing

I only started watching horror/gore films in the last year or so. As a consequence the fantastic 1982 version of The Thing is still relatively fresh in my memory and has rightly earned it's place in my top five horror films.

I saw the trailer a while back and was very unimpressed to say the least and debated whether I should see this particular version of the film.

The film is meant to be a prequel to the 1982 version and therefore ends as the 1982 film starts with the dog running away from the compound.

The film starts with paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), being asked by Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) to join him on an expedition to help identify a creature found frozen underneath the ice of Antarctica. When they arrive, there is a team of American and Norwegian scientists, as well as additional support staff.

The first task is to try to identify what the creature is. Against the advice of Lloyd, Halvorson insists on getting a sample of tissue from the creature where he determines that it is nothing that has ever been found before. This is a cause for celebration for the camp until the creature makes its presence known.

The story then goes on in a very similar way that the 1982 version does, in that the creature can imitate human cells and the people within the compound have to be able to identify who is human and who isn't (all down to whether you have fillings apparently)

Ultimately the creature can only be destroyed with fire, so there's a lot of flame-throwers being used, a fair amount of blood and gore although not really enough to satisfy the torture-porn fans.

Let's start with the good things about the film: Lloyd is a welcome addition to the team. She's a strong female in the Ripley from Aliens series mould and unusually there is no love interest, which means that the film's focus is solely on the creature rather than some shoe-horned romance. The role was played really well by Winstead.

I also like Joel Edgerton's character, helicopter pilot Sam, who is a reluctant hero until the very end. Edgerton has a great screen presence and has the right attitude for playing the action hero.

The acting was passable, some of the shots were interesting and there were no lulls in this 102 minute film.

However, it's a film that suffers because it is both too similar and different to the 1982 version. It's similar in that the story is virtually identical (despite it being a prequel). The special effects don't appear to have moved on or improved since the 1982 version.

The film doesn't have the tension or the chill factor of the 1982 version. I simply didn't care about the characters, because there were too many of them, so it got a little confusing working out who had been taken over by the creature.

The creature itself appears to have been based on the aliens from District 9 and was, in my opinion, lacking in imagination in both its structure and what it was able to do.

Verdict: A soulless remake of a fantastic film. Only positives were the strong performances of Winstead and Edgerton. Avoid and watch the 1982 version instead.