Morgan Creek Productions
103 min., dir. by Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr., with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, and Ulrich Thomsen

In my mind, there’s no argument. It was 1982, and John Carpenter made the best remake in film history. Adapting the already well-made Howard Hawks film, The Thing From Another World, (which was inspired by the John W. Campbell Jr. story, Who Goes There?) Carpenter and his team were able to bring a spectacular visual edge to a taut suspense thriller, without losing the stories’ poignancy. This new entry (a prequel to the 1982 film) is a nice little sci-fi action film on its own, but next to the Carpenter film, its attempt at being a straightforward monster movie doesn’t fit the bill.

Treasuring a discovery found deep within the ice near their base in Antarctica, a Norwegian research team seeks the aide of a paleontologist to help unearth what they have found. By means of association, Kate Lloyd (played by the ever so lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is the lucky winner who gets to fly south and dig out the find of the century. With a 300-yard-long flying saucer posing a challenge, the scientists decide to first extract the single life-form they found frozen near the surface. It doesn’t take long for the creature to burst out of its rectangular cell of ice and start wreaking havoc all over the Norwegian base. With the ability to assimilate and imitate its victims, the thing has a place to hide and take down its prey, one by one.

That there is the biggest problem with the film. The Thing imitates its victim, and then wants to hide and not be seen. In the Carpenter film, The Thing is only seen when there is no other option. In the new film, the creature does more to expose itself and run rampant than anything else. It’s an odd and inexcusable inconsistency. In essence, the creature goes from an unstoppable killing machine to a methodical shadowy mastermind over the span of one day (out in the open for the new film and calm and calculating in the ‘82 movie.) The Thing is meant to be a tale about paranoia — not just about others, but about ourselves. The characters in the Carpenter film are at times more worried that they somehow are not themselves and don’t realize it, compared to the fact that an alien may eat their face at any second. If the new film was titled differently and took place in, let’s say, a desert, it would not pose a problem.

The 1982 film is also infamous for its state of the art special effects that floored audiences and disgusted others. The new film has some nice looking effects, but the power of the tangible, in-camera wonders of the 1982 version are gone. The same can be said for the tense pace and paranoid overtones. In place of the outstandingly edited blood test scene, we get a laughable search for dental fillings.

Somewhere in the writing process the true heart of the story was lost. The script did have some clever and seemingly well thought out ways to present the situations and events that cross over from this film to the ’82 offering, though they all worked off the monster angle instead of the subtle mystery angle. And while it seems like they covered every angle, the filmmakers made everything a little more difficult than it had to be. Just more evidence that if this film could have been presented as remake it would probably have worked better. This is not a knock on the movie — it’s a well put together piece. It just brings up more questions than it answers.

How can I not compare these two movies, especially when I feel so strongly about the source material? If I could erase my memory for a fleeting moment and just talk about the 2011 The Thing, I would, but for all my issues with its slight bastardization of the 1982 film, The Thing does work well enough — if it were its own film. For people who have never seen any other version, it will be a thrill ride of monster proportions. But a “scare-you-out-of-your-pants” monster movie is nothing compared to the physiologically terrifying, yet viscerally satisfying Carpenter movie.

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Matthew Schuchman is the founder and film critic of Movie Reviews From Gene Shalit’s Moustache (http://shalitsstache.com). Also the contributing film writer forIPaintMyMind (http://ipaintmymind.org) he has no issue tearing apart and analyzing any film, even children’s movies.