The Thing (1982)
–So, how do we know who’s human? If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know it was really me?
Which is scarier: the idea of looking in a friend’s eyes and seeing a stranger or a friend looking into your eyes but unable to tell if you are really you? John Carpenter’s The Thing explores these ideas in an interesting way. In a sense this is a remake of Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World, a 50s sci-fi classic, and they are both based on the same source material. Hawks’s movie though deviates from the original short story on the type of monster involved. The Thing from Another World is a sentient plant life form that resembles the Frankenstein Creature. Carpenter goes a different route. His alien is a shape shifter that can imitate anything perfectly. While the original film was a solid thriller with an intriguing conflict between the preservation of a new life form and the preservation of human life, Carpenter’s different take on the material heightens the suspense.
The movie opens with a helicopter chasing a dog across the snow in Antarctica. The people in the chopper are trying to shoot the dog or blow it up. Our instinctive reaction is to be horrified: are these people so sick that they like to hunt dogs by chasing them in planes? The dog runs toward an American scientific outpost. The chopper sets down and one of the hunters tries to shoot the dog, but misses and shoots one of the Americans in the leg. He, in turn, is shot by another American. The other hunter fumbles with a grenade, drops it and accidentally blows himself and the helicopter to kingdom come. The dog is safe, but are the Americans?
Kurt Russell leads the cast playing MacReady, or Mac. He’s also a pilot who flies the scientists around wherever they need to go. Wilfred Brimley plays Blair, a doctor, who becomes very concerned about the impact of the shape-shifter. All of the cast are excellent with other standouts being Keith David as Childs who doesn’t want to believe any of this is real and Peter Maloney as George Bennings, a man who is closer to the dogs than any of his colleagues.
The isolation of the Antarctic setting combined with the shape shifter idea really creates a heightened sense of paranoia. We often wonder how well we truly know people, and in this situation that feeling is multiplied by a thousand. The only thing I didn’t really like about this film was its gore factor. This is a very visceral movie. It ranks right up there with Alien for some of the most gruesome special effects. Skin rips, blood splatters, organs explode. I really like the sense that you can’t trust anyone. As John Carpenter says in the special features documentary, it’s a bit like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Was None. Part of the fun lies in figuring out who is going to die, who is going to survive, and who is not who they say they are. It just wish they had toned down the special effects a notch. Oh well, I’m sure that’s what other people like the best – different strokes for different folks.
There was an early Season One episode of The X Files, “Ice,” that paid homage to this movie. You have the first scientific team that gets destroyed, and you have another investigating to find out what happened. There’s an infected dog, people are “not what they are.” Mulder and Scully pull guns on each other and have to decide whether or not they can trust one another. It’s one of the show’s best episodes and they do it with style, class and a lower gross out factor. Hmm, I think I might even like “Ice” better than The Thing.
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