~ E
Aside from the fact that it's over ten dollars to get into a movie after 5 PM these days, I forgot that going on a Friday night to see a horror movie around Halloweentime is basically asking to get pelted with teenagers. As if they're being launched from the menacing, revolving barrels of a prepubescence cannon, each shot self-propelled by a fuel reserve of douchyness and tipped with a warhead filled with obnoxiousness and pimple juice.
Anyway.
John Caprenter's remake/sequel to 1951s The Thing From Another World, shortened to The Thing, is one of my all-time favorite movies in the history of anything ever. It's right up there with Big Trouble in Little China, Halloween and, well, just about everything else Carpenter has done with the noted exception of Starman. So I was understandably skeptical when the new one was announced, but there are some positives here.
Remakes might be evil, but there is a right and wrong way to go about it. The wrong way is easy to illustrate with movies like Fast Five, Spider-Man, and the greasy, pulsing monstrosity that is Footloose. In both cases, I'm pretty sure I've found things in my crisper older than any of their inspirations. 2011s Thing starts on a high note by not re-using any characters - it takes the concepts from the 82s Thing and builds on them. There is an incredible amount of detail - myself, X and E all took turns pointing out where certain bits were constructed shot-for-shot from 82, including the ice block room, the hole above the space ship, the exploded storeroom, and others. Also, the plot devices from the first are used, but not copied - there's a remake of the infamous test scene, but the test is completely different and holds with it different ramifications.
Then there's the Thing, the real star of the show. The computer effects are done well, particularly one scene where the monster only partly absorbs a member of the crew. The way the creature hunted reminded me a lot of the incorrectly named velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which, in comparing it to the original, actually makes it less scary. More grotesque maybe, since there is no shortage of the monster running in front of the camera and hogging all the screen time Dead Space style, but on the whole, the movie was much less frightening.
But my biggest complaints have more to do with the writing than anything. First, there is no sense of pacing. Ever since the success of American-made Japanese horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge (not originals Ringu and Ju-On), all notion of building tension for anything more than a few seconds before something goes "Boo!" is gone. 82s Thing has quite a few action sequences, and the monster is just as much a camera hog, but it all builds up to a final confrontation as a doomed Kurt Russel blows up everything in sight in order to kill the monster. The big reveal at the end of 2011s Thing doesn't carry the same ultimate confrontation weight. We've already seen the monster in all of its viscous glory, so where else is there to go? And without giving away too many spoilers, the last five minutes don't completely jump the shark, but the dude definitely smacked his balls on the dorsal fin if you get what I'm saying.
The second complaint is that there is a good deal of wasted screen time. Much of the alleged "dramatic tension" does nothing to make the audience feel one way or another toward the characters, with the exception of the leads. In 82s Thing, scenes were cut because they over-explain the situation, and the movie's downtime really built the characters - the pothead pilot, the hip dude on roller skates, drunk-ass hero MacReady, Wilford "Diabeetus" Brimley, and so forth. In 2011s, there isn't so much a cast as two leads, two supports, and a bunch of throwaway Norwegians. Most of the cast don't even get names. The heroine is accompanied by the only other American on the base at the end; a fact which nags at me. He's possibly the least interesting character out of all of them, and yet takes up a huge part of the third act. I say that because the two of them trade the most useless dialog throughout.
What is with the trend for modern movies to condescend to their viewers? Most of the dialog just describes things that the audience already knows, like when the two remaining survivors walk into a room that is clearly destroyed and one says, in paraphrase, "It looks like there was fighting here." No shit. He might as well have said, "Hey it's cold out," when the movie clearly takes place in Antarctica and there's a few tons of snow outside and the passed three conversations have mentioned an incoming blizzard. I'm not stupid, movie, so stop talking to me like I am.
The last poor mark the movie gets is the fact that it simply isn't scary. I'm hammering this again because horror is a genre very close to my heart, and cheap thrills and jump-out moments just aren't frightening. Sure, I jumped in my seat a couple times, but it has more to do with the fact that sudden images of a dozen playful kittens rolling around in a pile of downy feathers would be fucking terrifying in a dark room with a 500-decibel BOM-BOM-BOMMM. And once you get shocked at a movie the first time, the same trick stops working. And nothing ages faster than computer graphics. As I said, the creatures reminded me heavily of Jurassic Park, and with all of the CGI in movies these days, anything rendered in Full-3D-Out-The-Ass Vision just looks bad anymore, whether it's dinosaurs, aliens or blue hippies. 3D graphics are so pervasive in films that we're desensitized to them. I imagine this movie is going to look really bad in the next year or so, but it's also the reason why 82s Thing and movies like Alien have help up against the years so well. Good horror movies need to play on the audiences fear of the unknown. Once something is known, it ceases to be scary. And the quickest way to do that is to throw a bunch of animated alien monsters in front of the camera so often you'd think it was a grotesque alien monster fashion awards.
At the end of the day, 2011s Thing is pretty good. And I say good in the sense of nearly falling down the stairs and catching yourself at the last minute. It avoided the common pitfalls of remakes and there was a ton of attention paid to making it fit with the 82 inspiration (and keep fans happy). But at the end of the day, it's just another remake. Of a remake.
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