This movie isn't a remake by strict definition but is, in fact, a prequel. However the story and premise is so similar to that of the original that it could easily be a remake with creative editing.
The first The Thing was released in 1982, written by Bill Lancaster (of Bad News Bears fame) and directed by John Carpenter. The movie was itself a remake of the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World, which was based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There?, though Carpenter's movie is more faithful to the source material than the original movie. Carpenter had effectively invented the modern slasher 4 years prior with 1978's Halloween and the original movie really saw him upping his game. The film is considered a horror classic for its bleeding edge special effects and effectiveness in creating sensations of claustrophobia and paranoia. The movie was rife with brooding tension that exploded effectively at the finale. It was brilliant combination of bizarre and disgusting with tense and psychological, and is consistently ranked one of the scariest movies of all time.
The prequel was written by Ronald Moore, a writer for Star Treks TNG, DS9, and VOY and Battlestar: Galactica, and Eric Heisserer who wrote the screenplay for the Nightmare remake and the script for Final Destination 5. It was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., in his feature film directorial debut.
The basics of the story is that a research team at a remote Antarctic station encounter an alien monster that has the capability to perfectly mimic any organism at the cellular level. The alien feeds on each member of the team while they slowly fall apart and turn on each other due to their suspicion that one of the others is The Thing. In the end the research station is destroyed in an attempt to kill the creature and the final few survivors are left in the unforgiving cold to die, unable to trust each other.
The only major variation from this is that in the prequel they dig up the alien before it breaks out, and the end of the prequel dovetails directly into the opening shot of the original movie.
The prequel has a bit more of a meandering opening while it assembles its cast and establishes the setting. I will say that the sweeping shots of the snowy wasteland are pretty gorgeous. It also picks a much more higher pitch once the action does start, burning through cast members much more quickly than the original did. It made it a bit chaotic at times, and hard to follow. To an extent this served to highlight the chaos and panic in the film, but it was too easy to lose track of characters which is a bit disappointing to me when I'm trying to follow a story. It also did a pretty decent job of recreating the claustrophobic environments of the first movie, but not so much the paranoia. The movie moved too quickly to really identify with any of the characters, although I think that was more because it was trying to make you feel like you were part of the events by dragging you through the plot at a break-neck speed.
Early on there was some awkward hand-held camera shots, which is usually a way of placing the audience inside a scene and making the action seem tense and unstable. Thankfully it either stopped being as noticeable or they stopped using it before the middle point.
The worst point of the entire movie is probably the CGI, and that is to say it was jaw-droppingly terrible. The original did everything with incredible models, animatronics, puppets, and massive creativity in picking their shots. Everything looked real and disgusting, albeit a bit hokey sometimes. This remake uses real, practical effects sparingly, and even then it uses them when the monster is mostly out of shot. I'm sure this saved them money, but it meant that when the monster was being shown in all its glory it was entirely CG. So what should have been the most horrifying and disgusting shots were reduced to CGI that would have looked dated 5 years ago. There were definitely spots when it looked good, but it was also very hard to be afraid of because of the spots where it looked like a stupid.
In fact, the majority of the forms the monster took that were new to this movie (e.g. the woman's head hanging off the back of the monster) looked silly. The best ones were when they borrowed forms from the original movie. It had to be in the two-faced, backwards form by the end for the original timeline to work, and when it got there it looked the best.
The theater I saw it in had the sound up absurdly loud, and the creature sounds were really high pitched. The sound system assaulted me and left me a bruised and battered man. It was traumatic.
All negatives aside, I actually thought this was a pretty decent movie. It wasn't quite as good as the original because of the really bad CGI. The decision to focus more on chaos and panic was well served by the faster pacing, although I really liked the paranoia and tension of the first one. This doesn't quite hold up to the original as a horror film, because the creature effects and sense of claustrophobia in the original are much scarier than the immersion in the chaos of the prequel.
This was a fun scifi/action/thriller. Watch this, then watch the original to continue the story and get creeped the hell out.
Re-rererererere week is over! Tomorrow night, Found Footage week starts with [REC]
No comments:
Post a Comment