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When I find out that one of my favourite movies is getting a sequel, prequel, remake or some other such continuation of the saga, I don’t really feel strongly about it one way or the other and don’t really keep up with all the news and details like so many others seem to do. John Carpenter is one of my favourite directors and The Thing is arguably his best movie, yet news of a prequel didn’t really excite me or fill me with dread. Granted, some of the details I did hear seemed a little troubling – such as the inclusion of CGI or female characters, both of which the original managed to avoid – yet I still remained cautiously optimistic. So opening day came around and I gladly went in to see what was what.
The Thing (if it’s a prequel, why does it have the same name?) takes place shortly before the events of the original, based around the team of Norwegian scientists who first discovered the titular creature buried in Antarctica. A few Americans are flown in to do research on the remains, and before long the Thing comes alive and it all becomes very familiar. Yeah, as far as remakes/prequels of monumental classics go, The Thing is one of the ones that tries to stick as closely to what made the original great in the first place. It got to the point where I was actively trying to pick out which of the new characters were going to behave like the ones in the original. Certain scenes even seem like eerily similar replicas, plus I’m already picking out what happens based on what little evidence was featured in the original. Such fidelity wasn’t necessarily a curse, though – for all the familiarity, the film still maintains just enough of a difference to make it interesting. The entire premise of The Thing still works, even if it’s all very familiar.
Then there’s the effects work – of course, the CGI isn’t quite up to scratch, but it allows for some interesting mutations not really possible with animatronics. Much like the original, the acting is fairly competent, even though I noted that the bulk of the characters are either similar to ones from the original or are otherwise recognisable archetypes. As a prequel that stays the course rather than attempt anything particularly radical, The Thing is reasonably good. I may have a fairly generous opinion of it because I love the original, but I know what I expect when I go into a movie like this. Despite some of the glaring differences (or predictable similarities), it’s still a fairly competent genre exercise – quite fittingly for a movie based on The Thing, it’s a disturbingly good imitation.
