THE THING (Matthijs van Heijningen). 103 minutes. Opens Friday (October 14). Some subtitles. See listing. Rating: NNNN
First things first: yes, there are people who have never seen – let alone heard of – John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing. I know this because some of them were at the Toronto preview screening of Matthijs van Heijningen’s 2011 film The Thing, and they reacted with very loud disbelief at van Heijningen’s ending, which is very clearly the beginning of Carpenter’s film.
There’s no earthly need for a prequel to John Carpenter’s movie, a grim and self-contained exercise in claustrophobic body horror that may well be the best horror movie of the last few decades. (David Cronenberg’s The Fly – ike Carpenter’s film, a remake of a fondly remembered but vaguely disreputable 1950s sci-fi thriller – comes in a close second.) Even now, Carpenter’s Thing is taut, unimpeachable cinema, readable as a straight-up monster movie where the monster is hiding inside the guy three feet away, and as a charged exploration of unconscious male anxiety in the early age of AIDS. It ain’t broke, and it don’t need fixing.
But that’s why this new Thing works so well. It has no intention of improving on Carpenter’s film, or even impinging on it. Instead, it sidles up to the material, nudges it over the tiniest bit and plops down alongside it. It tells the story of humanity’s first encounter with the body-stealing E.T. in “Antarctica, Winter 1982,” starting a week before the events of Carpenter’s film, which is set in a U.S. research station a few miles away from the Norwegian camp where the original discovery was made.
Carpenter’s film offered a couple of blurry videos of that discovery, and his characters paid a dread-laden visit to the burned-out the Norwegian camp. Van Heijningen’s film shows us how it got burned and what happened to the people who were there at the time.
It turns out they were American and Norwegian personnel, including a newly arrived palaeontologist (Scott Pilgrim’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her chilly Norwegian boss (Ulrich Thomsen, the imposing Danish star of The Celebration and In A Better World), who’s flown her in from New York to help investigate a mysterious discovery under the Antarctic ice.
We know what that discovery is, of course, and what it can do, and how it goes about doing it – all of which is re-established with vicious efficiency, though not in quite the same narrative order as Carpenter’s film. Eric Heisserer’s screenplay doesn’t delineate the supporting characters as sharply as Bill Lancaster’s did in 1982, but it does tell us enough about them to explain why the action unfolds in slightly different directions than Carpenter’s film.
A studious palaeontologist, for instance, might hit upon a different sort of test for Thing-ness than sticking a hot needle in a blood sample. One of the traps the Thing springs on its human prey in Carpenter’s film wouldn’t work here, so it isn’t attempted – though different opportunities lead to a couple of new tricks. That said, the dynamics of trust and betrayal among the humans play out in much the same way, and a Thing on fire will run around like, well, a Thing on fire. And no plan involving incendiary devices is ever 100 per cent perfect.
The mirrored actions and snatches of dialogue from the 82 Thing are deployed with just enough wit to avoid being dismissed as replication. The new script even finds a way to restore a subplot from Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby’s 1951 The Thing From Another World that didn’t make it into Carpenter’s film, where a scientist’s blind insistence on studying the obviously malevolent creature – rather than blowing it to holy hell – threatens the safety of everyone else.
It’s not perfect, mind you. While Winstead makes a compelling hero (a character who doesn’t have an analogue in Carpenter’s film), Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, clearly intended to stand in for Kurt Russell and Keith David, come up a little short. Part of that is due to the plot, which keeps them off-screen for most of the movie’s second act. And while van Heijningen uses CG effects sparingly, some of the key creature shots have the unconvincing weightlessness of digital imagery, including one that directly quotes one of Rob Bottin’s amazing animatronic effects from 1982.
But here’s the thing: even when he doesn’t quite stick the landing, van Heijningen is always trying to do justice to the source material. He’s not appropriating Carpenter’s style, but saluting his attitude.
For van Heijningen, the point of making this was to walk around in the universe of a movie he truly loves, and to add to that universe in a way that not only honours the original, but reminds us why it deserves to be honoured in the first place.
The use of music is similarly well-considered. Marco Beltrami’s orchestral score incorporates the repetitive bass notes of the minimalist theme Ennio Morricone composed for Carpenter, and where the earlier film played Stevie Wonder’s Suspicion for us early on to wink at its paranoid theme, the new one uses Men at Work’s Who Can It Be Now?, which does the same here – but also tweaks the title of the John W. Campbell Jr. short story Who Goes There?, which of course serves as the source material for all three Thing movies.
Intriguingly, the movie’s soundtrack credits Who Can It Be Now? exclusively to Men at Work frontman Colin Hay, rather than the band itself. If it’s a re-recording, that would make it one of many almost perfect imitations running around inside this brand new Thing. And it would be entirely appropriate.
