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.
The Doom That Came To Gotham; written by Mike Mignola and Richard Pace; illustrated by Troy Nixey, Dennis Janke, and Dave Stewart (2000): For a time in the 1990's, DC seemed to release a new 'alternate history' take on Batman every week. Many of them were very good, but the sheer weight of stories about Batman in various historical and fictional locales eventually crushed the whole Elseworlds line that had been meant to showcase alternate takes on all DC's heroes.
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola salvages the concept here in a nice riff on H.P. Lovecraft's (never-named-herein) Cthulhu Mythos, with the title bouncing off the HPL short story "The Doom That Came To Sarnath." Mignola sets the story in the 1920's, when Lovecraft was shifting into high gear on the Cthulhu Mythos, and runs Batman, DC, and pop-culture history through a blender. The story homages both Lovecraft and the Lovecraft-derivative John Campbell novella "Who Goes There?", which would go on to be the basis for three movies named The Thing.
Out of the Antarctic comes a universe-threatening menace, and only globe-trotting adventurer Bruce Wayne can stop it, possibly by putting on that Bat costume he's made. Mignola comes up with some pretty clever, Lovecraftian riffs on familiar Bat-family characters that include the Penguin, Mr. Freeze, King Croc, Ra's Al Ghul, and Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, and mixes in Jack Kirby's Demon, the Green Arrow, and some of his own Hellboy -- which itself homages Lovecraft in its very foundations -- with a plague of lizards and some very Hellboyish tweaks to the Demon and Batman himself.
Fun this definitely is. I don't know much about Canadian penciller Troy Nixey, but he's a good fit for the material: this is a grungy world of Jazz-Age grotesques and squamous, batrachian horrors. It's fitting that Nixey ended up directing a film for producer Guillermo del Toro, 2011's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Recommended.
The Thing, written by Eric Heisserer, based on the novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell Jr. and The Thing (1982), written by Bill Lancaster, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Kate Lloyd), Joel Edgerton (Sam Carter), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Jameson) and Ulrich Thomsen (Dr. Halvorson) (2011): Totally pointless prequel to John Carpenter's gory, gonzo adaptation of John Campbell, Jr.'s 1938 sci-fi-horror novella "Who Goes There?", which itself bore more than a few suspicious resemblances to H.P. Lovecraft's 1936 sci-fi-horror novella "At the Mountains of Madness." Here, we follow the adventures of the (mostly) Norwegian Antarctic base scientists who first discover the eponymous Thing and who, reduced to two guys in a helicopter at the very start of Carpenter's Thing, try to stop the creature from reaching the American base of that film. Got all that?
Carpenter's film wasn't truly great -- the dialogue and plotting needed a bit more zip for that -- but it was improved immensely by its cast of character-actor All-Stars and its ground-breaking alien special effects work, which still looks amazingly creepy and goopy and disturbing even now. Unfortunately, the CGI here suffers from underdone CGIitis, with the alien, while far more complex in several of its manifestations, lacking weight and heft regardless of its size on the screen.
It doesn't help that the Thing has lost about a 100 IQ points, bursting out of hiding at several points when pretending to stay human would have secured its supposed goal: getting off the isolated Antarctic base to a more populated place with better transporation options so that it could, given its biology, eventually replace everything biological on the planet with itself. Instead, it pops out at inopportune moments so often that one eventually believes that it's actual purpose on Earth is to run around scaring people and breaking shit.
The people aren't much brighter. At one point, a group of them locks two suspicious helicopter-crash survivors in a shack because doing so will protect the group in the event that the survivors are really the Thing. But we've already seen the Thing shoot twenty feet into the air and through a roof from a standing start inside a giant block of ice that it's been trapped in for 100,000 years. How is the shack going to stop it? Oh, well.
Perky young protagonist Mary Elizabeth Winstead (the roller-skating, Amazon-package-delivering love interest in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) plays a character from the Bones school of incredibly young bone experts. Everyone else is pretty much interchangeable except the actor who played Mr. Eko on Lost, criminally underused here, and the guy playing the base commander, the latter of whom looks like Sting during his Mandolin-playing German-pimp stage. Boy, Sting makes a lousy Antarctic base commander. No wonder the Police broke up. Not recommended.
