New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

The Thing (Universal Pictures, 2011)

The bulk of the action of the latest film happens just a few days before the events detailed in John Carpenter’s version. A group of Norwegians find the alien spacecraft that crashed before the opening title of Carpenter’s film. They stumble onto this vast spacecraft that’s encased in the ice. We cut over to PhD student Kate Lloyd, an American paleontologist who is contacted by the Norwegians to help them work on the site. She’s not given much information. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the American paleontologist with the compellingly heroic form. She may not have the bronzed look of some god like McReady in the original story, but she’s got sharp American hero written all over her.

Lloyd is brought to the site, where she promptly discovers that she is there to aid in extracting an alien from the ice near the spacecraft. Here we have a wonderful opportunity to watch the deeper psycho-intellectual ensemble work of the group of people who discover the alien. We have a really cool opportunity for a modern cinematic drama to get into the subtle arguments for and against thawing this thing out and studying it.

Sadly, this is a script written by relatively inexperienced screenwriter Eric Heisserer. He’d written the Nightmare On Elm Street remake from a couple of years back. He’d written Final Destination 5. And he wrote this film. To his credit, Heisserer knows his limits and he solidly avoids the mind-pummelingly complicated task of turning a really interesting scientific debate into compelling horror theatre. He knows what works best with his own personal style of storytelling and what works best or him is a script with very, very little dialogue.

The block of ice containing the dormant alien is brought to the base. Rather than discuss the possibility of thawing it out, they decide to drill a hole into the ice and take a tissue sample. Okay, so that sounds pretty logical and a lot more practical than trying to dissect the damned thing on a gross anatomical level, but there’s still the danger of exposing potentially nasty biohazards to a group of people very, very far from decent medical facilities. Lloyd expresses some serious concern over what taking a tissue sample might do… and she’s promptly shot down. A really interesting conversation about specifics is pretty soundly avoided and the film progresses pretty predictably from there.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5       6       7