Just saw The Thing
As a prequel, the movie does an admirable job of setting up key shots that will later be seen in the original film (stay for the credits--thank god they added that), with one BIG exception that I suspect everybody just forgot about. Can you figure it out?
No. Tell me!
Actually I just returned from seeing The Thing (2011) not realizing it was a prequel (damn media telling me it's a remake!) so I'm pretty interested in The Thing (1982) now and I'm loving the discussion that was going on here..
This is what I have to say about it:
On CGI: Normally I like monsters/creatures being left to the imagination. Signs went downhill fast with that closeup of the alien. Don't be Afraid of the Dark had the same problem with the dark fairies/goblins. The Thing though.. not soo much. I felt that most of the shots of it were quick cuts that, while showing detail, didn't show you for long, so for a good chunk of the movie the creature still felt very abstract and hard to comprehend, which I feel still leaves something to the imagination. It's ever changing, so even if you get a good shot of it on film, you can just imagine what it will look like after it assimilates more beings. Also, it reminded me of so many of those Resident Evil creatures, so much so, that I kept thinking "this would make a good survival horror game," then I read
thisThere are definitely some incongruities between the two movies (mostly things involving the alien spaceship, which does not have the same design in the prequel and is still covered by ice in the prequel)
Because I haven't seen The Thing (1982), I'm going to assume what you mean here is that the ship is NOT covered in ice, yet remains covered in the prequel..? Well at the end of the prequel, it doesn't appear to be covered. it's still buried but it isn't completely covered. (Just in case spoiler tag here: )
when 'Ramona Flowers' and the American pilot are exiting the ice cavern, you can see an opening in the background with flashing lights, presumably from the explosion, that die off before they get to the vehicleThere was an aspect to the original movie I'd forgotten, though, which for some reason doesn't pop up in the prequel: the Thing can infect victims with bodily fluids. For some reason, the prequel ignored that. Weird.
Actually I think they do touch on it.. Now, I may be mistaken on this first example (because as someone said earlier, it was hard to differentiate between most of the characters) but..
After The Thing is found underneath one of the cabins, a limb reaches out and impales one of the Norwegian crew members as a second crew member watches. That second crew member has the firsts blood splattered all over his face. Now this can go one of two ways, again it's hard to tell who these people were half the time so bare with me here..
1. That crew member was the one who became ill and was going to be transported to the hospital via helicopter before it crashed.
2. That crew member was infected by The Thing and was the crew member that attacked from within that very same helicopter ;
either way, I was under the impression that it could infect via bodily fluids.
Another example of this is actually hinted at by Ramona Flowers when
she and the American Pilot are out on the hunt. She has the flamethrower, he has a axe. After he slices the Arm Thing ? in two he's about to grab the axe embedded into the wall and covered in its blood before Romana sternly tells him not to grab it.
Also, if Das Thing can just start up his spaceship to get the f*ck out, why didn't he do that 100,000 years ago? Just sayin'.
True! Thought the same thing; why would it leave the ship to get frozen in ice if it could just start it up and leave? I was discussing this with my girl on the way home from the movie though, and in a fan-fiction esque way, I came up with an explanation..
(WARNING: retarded conjecture ahead)
At the start of the prequel, the head scientist states something along the lines of "we've discovered a structure [...] and a survivor" which can imply a few things. Did they go inside the ship and find other creatures? If so why were those bodies not studied? Perhaps they were too badly mangled thus making the frozen creature a prime candidate for research.
If they didn't discover other bodies, or couldn't access the ship to discover others, living or dead, it makes you wonder if the Thing we see, thawed from the ice, really was the only creature aboard. Did you see the size of the ship? That thing is massive, so is it wrong to assume one creature alone could pilot it? Even if it could, why would it need such a massive vessel for itself? You'd think no matter what it's purpose, there had to be even a small crew of some kind.
Then I started to think about the aesthetics of both the creature and the ship itself. The ship looks.. and you may not understand how I'm trying to describe it here, but.. it looks too clean cut for a creature of that nature. It obviously has some intelligence, being able to copy a human and speak the language with ease, but the look of that ship didn't fit with the look of the creature. I picture it in a ship that looks more, for the lack of better words, 'organic' looking.. picture the Cetan ship from Perfect Dark 64, or the Skedar weapons from the same game, even the Drudge weopons of the conduit. I picture the Thing having this type of technology.
Instead we have a ship that looks, inside and out, to be your classic Grey's vessel. Very sterile, very beyond your imagination high tech (what exactly was that pixelated-panel thing? Ramona got distracted by?). That's what got me thinking even more.. what would the prequel to this prequel be like;
What if there was a race of aliens, that fit the Grey's description, who had recently discovered a type of virus or parasie (the Thing) that started off small but grew exponentially as it infected/copied/assimilated the crew of the ship, causing it to crash land in our Antarctic, and in an attempt to feed/assimilate and grow, left the confines of the ship only to be frozen for thousands of years until found.. leading us to this prequel film?
Yeah.. think about THAT!