Written by Matthew Escalante, Staff Writer & Copy Editor
“The Thing” is a legendary 1982 sci-fi horror film created by John Carpenter, renowned for its suspense and outstanding visuals. Except we aren’t talking about “The Thing 1984” but the 2011 prequel “The Thing” by Mattjijis van Heisserer.
Despite the praise its predecessors gets “The Thing 2011” actually ranks quite low compared to other movies within the genre. “The Thing 2011” revolves around the crew of the Norwegian research station “Thule”. The crew discovers an alien and spaceship sealed within the Antarctic ice and decide to extract the frozen corpse and bring it into the station. While the crew celebrates their recent discovery, the alien breaks free from its icy tomb and begins to roam about the station. The crew soon finds the creature and puts it down by burning it.
While the characters recover they begin to conduct research on the alien’s body, just to find out it has the ability to disguise itself as a human by altering its own cells to look human. Soon after one of them bursts into a “Thing,” causing mayhem across the isolated facility. Not knowing who is a thing and who is human, the crew will isolate themselves, while trying to discover the imposter among their ranks.
So where did this movie go so wrong? Well, there are several factors that play into its questionable performance. First off, the movie is usually compared to its legendary counterpart “The Thing 1982” which set the bar abnormally high for this movie. Trying to recreate the suspense and density of such a film is no easy task.
Next is the movie’s pace. Some will argue that this movie takes too long to explain what the audience probably already knows— which is the concept of a body-stealing alien. The problem here is that this movie is a prequel, so our audience already knows quite a bit of information.
Another downfall is the movie’s poor cgi. Many of the aliens and “human things” are cgi, but it is not hard to tell. Cutting this movie some slack, cgi in 2011 wasn’t the best and the original 1982 film used actual props and such to create the aliens, making the orignal much more realistic.
Finally, filmgoers must grapple with the flat characters. Though you don’t need to develop all of the characters in a horror film, it would help to be emotionally invested in some of the characters, rather than watching someone you don’t even know get picked off early in the film.
Despite all of these problems , I don’t believe that the film is overall that bad. Is the cgi substandard ? Yes, kinda, but it accomplishes what I believe it needs to do which is scare and make people somewhat uncomfortable. I do believe that the characters are a little flat though there were some who the audience grows to care about. I feel as if the similarities between The Thing 2011 and The Thing 1982 are understandable, since they are part of the same series. That being said, the pace is significantly slower than its older brother, something I’m not quite a fan about but I can look past .
In the end, The Thing 1982 is much better than The Thing 2011, though I don’t believe 2011 should get as much backlash as it does. Overall I would give the film a 6 out of 10, Happy Halloween my friends and watch your back…(Just watch 1982)