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.
The Thing from Another World (1951): adapted by Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks, and Ben Hecht from the novella "Who Goes There?" by John Campbell Jr.; directed by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks; starring Margaret Sheridan (Nikki), Kenneth Tobey (Captain Pat Hendry), Robert Cornthwaite (Dr. Carrington), Douglas Spencer (Scotty) and James Young (Lt. Eddie Dykes) : I suppose it's a measure of the contempt the producers and writers had for the source material that almost nothing remains of that source novella except the temperature (it's still cold) and the general idea (crashed UFO with an angry survivor).
The Thing from Another World nonetheless remains one of the minor science-fiction classics of the 1950's, but it's amazing how much is changed from John Campbell's 1938 original: not even the original names of characters survive in the screenplay.
Anyway, a UFO crashes at the North Pole near a U.S. experimental base. Some Air Force guys, led by the wooden Kenneth Tobey, arrive to help investigate. Soon, an alien with remarkable recuperative powers and an unquenchable thirst for blood starts rampaging around the experimental station. As he's a giant carrot, shooting him does no good, and unlike later versions of The Thing, there aren't a lot of flamethrowers lying around the base.
The movie's quite tense, with the hulking, monosyllabic alien -- who turns out to look like a bald Frankenstein's monster in a jump-suit -- kept off-screen most of the time, possibly because he looks like a bald Frankenstein's monster in a jump-suit . Campbell's paean to the resourcefulness of civilian scientists and engineers here becomes a paean to the resourcefulness of the Air Force. The chief, Nobel-winning scientist is an idiot who keeps trying to make peace with the alien even as the human body count mounts.
Though Professor Quisling really does have a point -- who wouldn't be pissed after crashing on an alien planet, getting frozen in a block of ice, and then almost immediately getting one's arm ripped off by a sled dog when one awakes? This has to be the worst first-contact scenario ever. Especially since the Air Force accidentally blows up the guy's UFO with some thermite while trying to excavate it from the ice. I'll be damned if I know why there were in such a hurry, and I'd hate to see them at a major archaeological dig.
It's fun to chart the differences between this film and John Carpenter's later, much more faithful adaptation of Campbell's novella. Only the giant carrot is a justifiable change -- visual effects of the early 1950's weren't up to a shape-changing alien. Watch the skies! Recommended.
