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The film is set in a US scientific research station in Antarctica. After a quick title sequence featuring a spacecraft crashing to earth, the film opens with a Swedish… er… Norwegian helicopter in hot pursuit of what appears to be an arctic dog, which is rushing towards the US station. The Norwegian lands the copter, botches an attempt to kill the dog by grenade and shoots at it a few times with a hunting rifle. The man in charge of station security kills the Norwegian and things get rolling.

The fantastic elements of the film settle-in slowly. MacReady (here a helicopter pilot played by Kurt Russell) flies out to search the station that the Norwegian came from, only to find it abandoned, with a strange-looking corpse in it that seemed to be in a state of painful structural change at the time of its death. There’s a large block of ice consistent with the chilly tomb that housed The Thing in both of the prior two incarnations of the story. Here the ice has been blown open. MacReady and company take the monstrous corpse back the US station for autopsy.

By avoiding the crash discovery scenes, the film is able to focus on the sheer horror of the story much more intensely. The first quarter of the novella is completely discarded. There’s no sense of decision-making here, which does rob the characters of their direct interaction with the source of the conflict. In this respect, the film is really no different from The Thing From Another World, but John Carpenter’s Thing quickly distances itself from a far less accomplished work through slickly stylish filmmaking that is in turns grizzly, beautiful, brutal and desolate.

In the role of soon-to-be mentally imbalanced Dr. Blair, cowboy and oatmeal spokesman Wilfred Brimley dissects the carcass of the beast with a steady, sober professionalism. As this happens, it is established that the dog that had been chasing the Swede - er… Norwegian had settled itself into the camp before attacking the rest of the dogs in a pretty grizzly scene.

Once it settles into a rhythm, John Carpenter’s The Thing comes pretty close to the source material. The fact that it can do this without getting bogged down in the kind of scientific jargon that would kill cinematic horror is kind of a huge accomplishment. It’s smart without being verbose, which is a very tricky thing to manage in a big-budget film. Carpenter manages to lock-in a sense of desolation in the film that it’s able to maintain even in casual interpersonal scenes between members of the ensemble.

Blair goes crazy. People start dropping off. There’s the feeling that some of the people here may not be who they appear. Shadows. Fire. Paranoia. And some incredibly wicked work by acclaimed make-up artist Rob Bottin. With a keen understanding of what works best on film, John Carpenter is able to frame some of the drama of the novella with a greater sense of narrative poetry than Campbell was able to manage. His greatest two accomplishments come at film’s end. The blood and heated wire tests of the story are given a stark framing here with a flame thrower, Petri dishes and a good portion of the remaining ensemble tied-up. The film manages a much darker ending than the original novella without deviating from the overall plot arc. It may not be quite as articulate as the original narrative, but it’s a far cooler presentation of it that doesn’t compromise the overall theme of the original.

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