John Carpenter's The Thing

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It's a schoedinger cat. The ending is deliberately ambiguous. It's neither a secret puzzle with well placed clues to find, nor a reality with a historical truth to reveal. It's an open end. Meaning that any interpretation that "collapses its superposition" is wrong.

This should be framed and hung somewhere.



Kurt Russell Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters
00:00 Kurt Russell's Iconic Characters
00:14 Escape from New York
04:15 The Thing
09:36 Tombstone
15:03 Death Proof
17:51 The Hateful Eight
20:35 Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
21:46 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
22:20 The Christmas Chronicles
23:51 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters



20:35. coolest



Both of them are classics, the old The Thing From Another World from 1951 and The Carpenter make of The Thing. The Carpenter version is closer to the 1938 novella by John Campbell, AKA, Don Stuart, Who Goes There, that inspired the story, but the 1951 version is excellent in it's own way, a piece of cold war camaraderie with minimal FX and a good monster. I have a marginal preference for the 1951 movie in all its monochrome glory.

An odd remake, Horror Express, is unnecessary and the 2011 remake was redundant. Another early 2000's remake seems to have floundered somehow.



I seem to have some background with this thread. Apparently, in 2014 I posted this, quite a journey for a comment -

Carpenter's Thing wasn't a remake, it was much closer to the 1935 John Campbell book Who Goes There? than the older version. The 1951 Thing was excellent as a low budget re-imagining of the book, but Carpenter's version was pretty close to the semi-original Campbell book. It's worth noting that Who Goes There was itself inspired by Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which was inspired by a chapter in Poe's only novel The Narrative of A Gordon Pym. None of the movies (especially the 2011 "prequel") is as good as Lovecraft's story, which had a movie version in the works to be done by Guillermo Del Toro. Elements of the story also appeared in The X Files. Unfortunately the investor interest in Madness dried up when James Cameron filmed a similar extraterrestrial version of the plot in Prometheus.