31 Days of Halloween - Day 15 - Movie 1

Since I have no means of screen capturing a movie that just came out in theaters, I didn't have much to work with to illustrate this entry on The Thing (2011). Most of the images are of actors running around with flashlights or flamethrowers, or expressing varying degrees of discomfort. There are some existing images of the thing itself, but they are either characters pondering over vague crab and insect part remains, or images that, in my opinion, give away too much. So instead, I simply chose an image of the beautiful Mary Elizabeth Winstead who stars as Kate Lloyd, a paleontologist with all the right ideas. If the movie had sucked, at least she'd be there to look at for two hours.

The movie doesn't suck though. This prequel to the 1982 The Thing, directed by John Carpenter takes a lot of care with paying attention to the details pertaining to the unfortunate Norweigan researchers who discovered the thing as shown in Carpenter's film. The Norweigan camp is accurately recreated as are the props and incidents discerned in Carpenter's film. This movie is a very worthy predecessor which blends seamlessly into the beginning of Carpenter's movie. The actors are all excellent, and the movie is not dumb. It does a great job of relating the paranoia that spreads among the characters once they realize that not all of them are human. The special effects are top notch, and some of the thing designs are pretty great, but they don't come close to approaching the delirious inventiveness of the constantly morphing creature created by Rob Bottin in the era before CGI. The advantage that CGI does give the thing in this prequel is mobility. While it doesn't spend a lot of time shape shifting, it does spend a lot of time on the go in a hyper aggressive manner, chasing down its victims.

There are a lot of parallel scenes to this movies predecessor, but enough freshness is brought to them so that they don't feel stale. Once the thing appears, this movie accelerates forward with the thing a constant and present threat. If anything, I wish this movie had been a little bit slower. My only other gripe is that, unlike Carpenter's movie, here, it seemed to be always obvious who was human and who was not, but because of the pacing of the movie, this isn't much of a detraction.

I really liked this a lot and recommend it to anyone who is a fan of The Thing (1982)