The Thing (2011)

Antarctica .. 1982 .. Winter .. (well .. Winter is pretty much all the time around there, even if it's called Summer once in a while). Near a Norwegian exploration station a discovery is made: a structure burred under the ice which looks like an alien shio. Not far away, frozen in a block of is found also .. the pilot (or how the title of the movie says - "The Thing"). Guess what happens next ?

Besides the invariable answer of "obviously, something bad", the biggest spoiler (that's so big that it doesn't make much sense for me to ignore it) is that the movie is not a remake for the 1982 John Carpenter's classic. It's a prequel. Well, that shouldn't tell much to somebody who didn't see the '82 movie. I've seen it long ago and I don't remember much, but still the fact that I've found out this is a prequel made pretty clear how it's gonna end. Well, surprise, it's not exactly like that. Anyway, going back to Carpenter's original, that's considered as one of the best horrors ever made. And you have to admit, that all the above context offers a perfect support for something like this. Imagine "Alien" (since it's not much until a prequel for this one too) set in an isolated research station in Antarctica. Besides that, about the creature, there is also probably the most important element, to quote a tagline from the original: "man is the warmest place to hide". Anyway from this start also the bad parts, to say it so ...

As I mentioned, it's been a while since I've seen the original, but I remember that I liked it. What I don't remember is if it had something that's basically granted by the context, but not to much exploited in the new version compared to the movie length at least. I'm talking about the lack of trust, which might go up to paranoid behavior, between the group members, given that it's not known "who is human and who is not". The movie could be 15 minutes longer, which 15 minutes should be dedicated to something like this. The psychological thrill provided by this context is barely exploited by the movie, maybe besides a scene or two (well, central to the movie, it's right). Besides that, as other points to criticize there are a bunch of scenes that don't add up, smth like (small spoilers below):

- "we must go and search for survivors where the chopper crashed"
- "not possible, that place can't be reached, we need another helicopter to go there"
(later in the evening, the two "survivors" are coming back on their own feet at the basecamp - and, well, "the thing" doesn't have wings if that's supposed somehow to explain)

or ...

- "and now what we're gonna do ?"
- "the closest station is a Russian one, at something like 80 km from here"
(the second day, a helicopter is tailing a dog that runs from the Norwegian base to an American one - or at least that should be the continuity with the movie from '82 even if it's not completely shown .. so .. to understand from this, that the dog ran more than 80 km with a chopper behind it)

And there are others too. To these, negatively speaking, you can add also the quality of the VFX which might be better than the '82 one but still far from the 2011 standards on a movie that has the Universal logo in the beginning. Anyway, long story short, I can't say that I lost my time with it. With all its issues, in the end what I wanted to see was a decent horror, not some Oscar material, and for that it was way better than, let's say .. the remakes from the last years of the initial versions of slasher series like "Friday the 13th" or "Nightmare on the Elm Street".

Rating: 3 out of 5