It's almost Halloween! And you know what that means!?! My yearly movie that I deem to be my "Halloween movie". Now to be my Halloween movie it doesn't have to be a horror movie or really even scary, it just has to have some sort of element that seems Halloween-ish, it can be zombies, kids trick-or-treating or a crazy alien that devours you and then replicates your cells. Enter The Thing.
This prequel centers in on the alien specimen before it gets to Kurt Russell, hence the tagline "It's not human. Yet." Aside from being grammatically incorrect, it's about all you need to know about this film. It takes place during winter 1982 at a scientific research station in Antartica. After a group of Norwegian scientists discover an alien creature and what appears to be a ship deep in the bowels of the Antartic ice. After the discovery they contact Dr. Sander Halverson a so-called "expert" who travels to Antartica to see the discovery but not before his research assistant Adam Goodman, invites a friend, Dr. Kate Lloyd, an american paleontologist invited to help identify the possible alien specimen.
Upon arrival they discover the creature frozen in a block of ice that they elect to remove from the ice as they assume it had died 100,000 years ago when it's believed the alien aircraft originally crashed on earth. So after cutting the ice around it they transport the block of ice back and place it in the research station where Dr. Halverson decides to take a tissue sample from the creature much to the shagrin of Dr. Kate Lloyd and we see the first real friction between the characters. After a couple of hours of thawing the creature busts out of the ice and he does so with a vengeance, where he begins to pick off and copy the research station residents. Will it ever be stopped?
Now "The Thing" is classified as a horror film, although it's not your usual slash-and-gore kind of horror that you generally see in Hollywood's makeover of classic horror films no matter where they fall on the R.P.S. scale (Remake, Prequel, Sequel) as it generally erred more so to the Thriller side, perhaps by fiscal constraints considering it's relatively small 38 million budget, for comparisons sake the recently released Dream House, a horror movie that takes place almost entirely in one space had a 50 million dollar budget. So 38 isn't a whole lot to go around for slash and gore when you need to make an alien aircraft, and all those ice vehicles and helicopters they used.
They spent next to no time on character development outside of Dr. Lloyd, with the other characters, you had just enough information on them to either feel bad when they died, feel good that they did die or loved watching them handle those flamethrowers. It's espescially hard to make a horror movie nowadays in a frigid climate considering we're so used to seeing half naked girls getting killed mid-orgasm that it's odd not to see, but in this film it's good that you don't because that just wouldn't work in Antartica. So kudos to the director for not slutting up the characters, including my future wife Ramona Flowers (Still the best movie of 2010 FYI). The visuals were passable at best, probably a mistake for not filming in digital when there's so much CGI in the film to make it look more even, however when no CGI was on the screen it was absolutely stunning as I have long been a fan of movies filmed with a good ol' 35MM, and thus made the mountainous scenes all that much more better.
Overall, this movie isn't spectacular, in fact it's barely even memorable. But it's a lot of fun to watch about once every year or so (maybe even on Halloween) and if you're a fan of the recent R.P.S.'s then you should be more than happy with this film, regardless of critics thinking every classic shouldn't be touched with a 20 foot pole.
No comments:
Post a Comment