[Another] Thing (2011)

The Thing [Unnecessary Prequel] (2011): a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) written by Eric Heisserer and based as was Carpenter's and the Howard Hawks-produced first adaptation The Thing from Another World (1951) on "Who Goes There?" (1938) by John W. Campbell Jr., a novella that owes a lot to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936); directed by Matthijs van Heijningen; starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the only character the film develops enough for you to care about her fate: It's a lot like John Carpenter's The Thing, only without the grungy, lived-in characters and lived-in monster and lived-in living quarters. 

The prequel exhaustively and exhaustingly extrapolates what happened at the Norwegian Antarctic Base back in 1982 when the Norwegians dug up that strange visitor from another planet who had been frozen for 100,000 years. 

We assume from our knowledge of the first few minutes of The Thing (1982) that two Norwegians, a dog, and a helicopter will still be around when this movie ends and The Thing (1982) begins. We know a priori what will destroy the Norwegians and their camp if we have seen Carpenter's Thing. And we've seen that aftermath in that camp, as characters in The Thing (1982) visit the Norwegian camp early on in The Thing (1982) and we watch as they alternate shock, horror, and bafflement at what they find there.

So the script of The Thing (2011) does explain how everything and everything we saw in that Norwegian camp in The Thing (1982). Connect the dots! The damn movie is a connect-the-dots exercise!

Only one character is memorable, and it's not the fault of the actors: the movie wastes that big, beefy, red-bearded Wildling we all love in Game of Thrones. It wastes that actor you've loved as Mr. Eko on Lost and probably not recognized as Killer Croc in Suicide Squad. Most of the characters are Norwegian, but there are some American pilots hanging around so that some scenes can plausibly occur in English. 

Oh, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, our heroic American ice-paleoarchaeologist, is good and has enough lines and acting chops to make us wish she were in another movie, or maybe just The Thing (1982).

I will unreservedly recommend exactly one scene that involves Winstead, one of the Norwegians, a search for keys in a storage room, a Thing, and the only iteration of the Thing in this movie to be both unexpected and unexpected horrifying. Oh, well. But you've got to locate that scene. Highly recommended for a 2 minute stretch; otherwise not recommended.