1982 @ 40: THE THING

A flying saucer grazes the Earth's atmosphere as it zooms by. We don't see it fall in but as it disappears into the dark it looks red hot. Credits, a low brooding drone given form by a thumping bass guitar. Antarctic Mountains. A helicopter is chasing a husky who evades bullets and grenades until reach an American outpost. The dog runs to his new best friends as the chopper crew manage to blow themselves to barbeque. The dog gets the run of the station until he bites one of the men and is sent to be with the other dogs who snarl at him until he turns into a tentacled monstrosity and starts absorbing them. Hearing the yelps the station crew run to the kennels with flamethrowers. Dammit, they thought the South Pole gig was gonna be a doddle.

The cast present a good range of masculinity from Kurt Russell's frontier machismo to Richard Masur's strong silent type to T.K. Carter's funky urban to Donald Moffat's military ruthlessness to Wilford Brimley's civil, grey haired science, and more. It is easy to see this as being film about male competitiveness and develop a commentary on the extremity that forces cooperation. The fear of penetration by a colonising other is there on screen all the time. While I doubt that considerations like this were too far away from Carpenter's thinking as he put this one together it strikes me that they were subtexts he used for the drama, not the other way around. They're still there, just not doing the job they usually do.

The body horror of the mutative fusions, the sudden extremity of the violence responding to the appearance of alienness and the great featureless white of the world around them make for a sobering meditation on the isolation, the shared loneliness of despair. If anything felt like the nuclear threat back in the early '80s it was this. Carpenter's action is dependably compelling and here, with the best practical effects he ever worked with, his weird scenes push so hard against what his viewers might have feared (at least the ones in the early '80s) that he had one character watching a severed head sprout spider legs and walk away say what the audience was thinking: "You gotta be fucking kidding."

John Carpenter's Thing ditched the carrot suit of the '50s version, went back to the source and amped up the paranoia of an alien that could adopt any appearance and intelligence it needed. Just enough backstory is delivered through action and reasoning and the rest of the tale is about fear of the familiar. Is that thing he said the truth or what the Thing needs us to believe? Characters that, through elegant writing economy are rendered potentially terrifying simply for acting like themselves. The worse this gets the more it points to a scorched earth solution. Is that what it will take?

Carpenter had begun his feature film career less than a decade prior to this. It was also science fiction (Dark Star) but its alien character was a barely disguised beach ball. With scant means but great style he fashioned the action classic Assault on Precinct 13 and the and the immortal slasher Halloween. By the time The Thing came up he was dealing a big studio budget that included a massive allocation for practical effects. Other directors climbing from cash-strapped indy to the major label clubhouse can fall on their faces just in the execution let alone the success of their mainstream works. Carpenter, gave us a magnificent imaginative movie  with a score by Morricone (who did a kind of cover version of Carpenter's own film music) where the scariest notions were extended into advanced level practical effects and the scope felt as big as the continent it was set on. And then it fell on its face.

Common wisdom puts the blame for The Thing's failure in cinemas on Carpenter reading the room all wrong. Alien was a few years back. This was the year of E.T., the loveable off-worlder that everyone wanted to cuddle. Carpenter had already added scenes to The Fog to bring them up to 1980 and, armed to the teeth with money for everything and a big warm go ahead to helm a project that had been left a long time in turnaround, he threw everything he could at the project and emerged with a bona fide genre classic. But the problem was that everything else was getting warm 'n' fuzzy endings. Even Poltergeist with Tobe Texas Chainsaw Hooper in the chair felt like a Spielberg movie (some accounts say it was one) I don't even have to spoil the ending to write that the course of events in The Thing at the halfway mark prevent the question of the situation reversing into happyland. The question of how much worse is a better one. To a culture in the scariest phase of the Cold War yet, the notion of mutually assured destruction was not the stuff of cuteness. 

John Carpenter has enjoyed a rich career making genre films that stand up to time and continue to be justly celebrated. There are enough and there is distinction enough to pick and choose, to be a Halloweenite or an Escape From New Yorker (I'm increasingly a Prince of Darkness-zen) but his own stated favourite is this one. Like many things that didn't blow up the box office The Thing rose to furtive life and perennialism on the then new home video market and remains one of the essential spines on the shelves of any physical media collector.

And for its grimness it is still a welcome watch forty years later. If the mutations look increasingly plasticky the higher your resolution (I saw it in 4K for this) the brooding silence and the humming spaces of the station still generate a fight or flight in us. But the more I see it the more I understand how wearying it felt to people living under the ICBM flightpaths with a cowboy in the Whitehouse and a Cossack in the Kremlin. The negotiations that will lead to the worst mutuality didn't even have the relief of a wisecracking Arnold Schwarzenegger. For all the snappiness of the dialogue and the engaging procedural language I'm just brought back to the threats: Trumpism, climate change, pandemic, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy cookers on parade and I think as the credits roll that I just had fun watching a great movie but I also feel exhausted. Not exhausted as after the catharsis of a well told tale but from one that refused to sing a sad song to make it better. It's Throbbing Gristle not Joy Division. It's Threads not The Day After. It's Come and See not Saving Private Ryan. It's The Thing not E.T. And it's completely bloody wonderful. Pass me some of that whiskey, now.

Review: and another THING!

Did you ever wonder just what went on before the opening scene of John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing? Nor did I. It's really pretty well explained in the first act of that film and the ensuing acts demonstrate it. The dogs, the search through Norwegian station, the icebound spacecraft, the mayhem back at base. It's all there.

So, someone caught the now popular meme that the only two movies that have survived the remake treatment with honour are Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (twice!) and The Thing. Like a lot of people to whom that thought occured I believed I'd discovered it. It's a strong demonstration of exception proving rule. So what's to lose by taking that one up? Read on.

Ok, plot. Fade in to the great white Antarctic, sweeping strings whose tonality bears a striking resemblance to ... you get the idea. Three Norwegians are travelling o'er the ice in a truck with tracks. You know they're Norwegian because their unsubtitled dialogue sounds like the chef from the Muppets. But the guy in front is telling a joke to the driver and the guy in the back is getting worried about some readings on an instrument that we don't need identified. The truck suddenly falls through a thin stretch of ice and lodges between the walls of a huge fissure, through which we see a spacecraft the size of Greater Geelong. A light suddenly gleams from its centre.

Cut to a lab at McMurdo Station, home of the good guys, the people who speak 'mer'can. A young woman in Antarctic fatigues listens to a year-marking Men at Work track on her walkman headphones. Enter a clean, ash blonde, humourless and so immediately suspect older man who speaks in an accent which casts him far from the safety of 'mer'ca (ie he's the baddie and shall be hoist on his own petar in due course). He's one of the Norwegians and he's looking for a paleantologist. He's found one. Right! Everybody in the chopper!

Back at the Norwegian camp they find a creature, dig it up and suffer the consequences finding out along the way that it can replicate any living thing it comes across. This offers an opportunity for this film to replicate the earlier version's powerful blood test scene but wait, there's something clever they're doing with it. But it isn't really, it's just a way of acknowledging the source material and claiming a smidge of originality to keep the meme about remake-able films hale and hearty. End of original stamp. Everything else you see on screen in this outing was done in Carpenter's version. The SFX are superior but expectably so that they just run by. Oh that's happening. Oh that's happening. Right. There's a famous moment in the 1982 version where a character witnesses something bizarre and speaks for the audience when he intones: "you gotta be fucking kidding me!" No chance of that here.

There are two aspects of Carpenter's version that are notably absent here: he honed in on one theme, trust, and steered through it with an unflinching hand, knowing its potential to create situations of tension and horror; Carpenter was working with his first sizeable budget but still thought like an indy director, allowing for nothing that didn't serve to squeeze the narrative to claustrophobic tightness until the climax which blazed gigantically by comparison. This prequel, already hampered by its audience's guaranteed awareness of the groundbreaking earlier version, makes the mistake of both trying to extend the '82 one backwards as well as provide something new. It was doomed to fail on both accounts and does. Worse, it provides none of the suspense of the earlier film, keeping its unmanageably large cast muddling the waters until in desperation it has to remove them just to clear the stage for the great drama hiding at its centre. Trouble is when that happens there's nothing left but routine. The final scene of Carpenter's film is funny, unsettling and despairing all at once, an intimate and inesacpable truth delivered as a kind of joke. The ending of this one has already been told in the beginning of that one. I know that's the idea but I also know that when it happens it just ... happens.

I hate claiming expertise in what movies should be rather than what they present themselves to be but I can't help but feel that if anything it might have benefited from the weary found footage approach which can effectively withhold information until its potential matures. Not here.

The Thing's hold on the title of repeatable films (owner of said title since the 2000's remake of Bodysnatchers dropped the pod)  has loosened. Not forever perhaps but the only reason that Carpenter's is on a par with the Hawks/Nyby original is the further originality he poured into it. That's just not present here.

Oh (this time for real) and another thing! There's a great fact about the '82 version: finally having enough money to hire a great composer for the score he got Ennio Morricone on board who delivered exactly the kind of music Carpenter himself might have written for the movie. Morricone had been a fan of Carpenter's movie music for years (understandably, it's brilliant). The score to the 2011 film is like none of that ever happened. Someone picked it off a shelf at Woolies and gave it to an orchestra. It sounds like there's an old school action movie happening in the next soundstage. New approach? Nope, same damn Thing!