Peter Maloney in the far superior 1982 verison
Stinks
on ice
Far
as I'm concerned, Matthijs van Heijningen's The Thing isn't a
proper prequel, isn't even a proper remake--rather, it's a lame,
lunkheaded effort at tribute that misunderstands everything that made
John Carpenter's 1982 remake of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's The Thing From Another World (1951) a genuine horror classic.
According
to interviews the filmmakers were interested in the Norwegian side of
the story, what happened before their camp was demolished. Turns out
'what happened' isn't half as persuasive, or as entertaining, as
what happened in the American camp; apparently the Norwegians are
taciturn loners who seemed perfectly comfortable living for months in
the deep snow. They don't have the Norwegian equivalent of 'copter
pilot McReady trash-talking a computer chess-program, or men rollerskating down hallways, doing what they can to kill
time. The enclosed conditions would drive anyone nuts, and in fact
someone points to assistant mechanic Palmer (David Clennon) in one corner listening
to his Walkman as an example of someone who's already cracked. The
incongruity between nobility of the men's duties and pettiness of
their actual actions recalls Kubrick's introductory shots of the bomber crew
in Dr. Strangelove (1964)--another nightmare comedy about the
possible end of the world.
Actually,
this picture's characters slavishly avoid resembling anyone in
Carpenter's film--to this end we are given paleontologist Kate Lloyd
(Mary Elizabeth Winstead), on loan to the Norwegian station to help
with their new discovery. Winstead in interviews insisted that her
character not experience any sexual or romantic tensions, this being
“inappropriate”--but when you think about it, what other kind of
tension can there be in an Antarctic ice station when women are
present? Does the most tangible tension onscreen have to be the need
to be politically correct? Hawks himself didn't avoid the problem; if
anything, he faced it head-on, made it not just part of a scene but
its liveliest, spiciest element--his women are known to be strong,
provocative characters who didn't wilt in the face of male machismo, but responded with their own brand of proto-feminism, formidable
adversaries for strapping men.
Carpenter
didn't use women in his film, ostensibly because there were no women
in John Campbell Jr.'s original short story (Carpenter's is a more
faithful adaptation than Hawks'). That said, a homoerotic subtext can
easily be read into the men's interactions, particularly in the
simmering rivalry between the Caucasian McReady (Kurt Russell) and the
African-American chief mechanic, Childs (Keith David).
No
such interaction--sexual, romantic, homoerotic--to be found in
Heijningen's movie; if anything, all we remember are Winstead's Lloyd
and (a distant second) Ulrich Thomsen's Dr. Halversen (mainly because
he is not Winstead, and after her is onscreen longest). More vivid in memory
are the creature's various incarnations, many of which are digitally
enhanced, and the way said incarnations kill or assimilate human fodder
(xenoeroticism, anyone?).
Concerning
treatment of the creature--Heijningen insists that mostly practical
effects were used, the shots lit and framed to conceal them; the CGI
enhancements are plainly visible, however, especially when the
creatures leap and run after their prey. Heijningen's creature tips its hand early, when it uses its arms like living grappling hooks; later, in the movie's most effective scene, the creature fuses into its human victim, grows legs, crawls away. Carpenter's different; there was a
progression in the way his creature revealed itself, a kind of
strip-tease where each shadow fell away exposing dog-thing shifting
to man-thing shifting to worse. And (as with the best of Carpenter)
there are images of unmatched horror, tinged with an eerie
lyricism--meteorologist Bennings (Peter Maloney) sitting in snow comes to mind, his
hand unnaturally distorted, his cry an unhuman bellow.
Some
sequences go beyond poetry into a kind of nightmare slapstick--the
moment, for example, when the head of geologist Vance Norris (Charles Hallahan) drips to the
floor and scuttles away, and Palmer looks on with incredulity: “You
gotta be fucking kidding!” The effects, impressive enough for their
time, have abandoned the realm of relative realism and strayed into the surreal/corporeal horror of Bunuel,
Cocteau, Cronenberg; we need to express our indignation at
Carpenter's effrontery, and Palmer's words are the perfect expression of
that outrage. The whole thing isn't just for the sake of being
grotesque, either--it's a crucial moment that plants the idea in
McReady's head, of how they can beat the monster.
By
way of contrast the most imaginative response anyone has in
Heijningen's picture to the creature is to shoot and run--no funny
exit line, no existentially defiant response to a patently unbelievable
sight ("you gotta be--"). The humans take the creature as seriously as it takes itself,
and we resist believing accordingly; the picture's too literal, too
straightforward for its own good.
Frankly,
it's easy to distinguish between Heijningen and Carpenter; you only
need distinguish between novice and seasoned master.
Heijningen's finest moments are perhaps the scenes where people are in
a room reacting to an attack; he eschews quick cuts to keep the
action coherent, and his staging is fairly inventive. Carpenter often opts for even simpler setups--like when McReady applies his
test on the rest of the crew, and has the unproven ones tied up,
including the corpses (a reasonable precaution). The creature's
reaction immediately reveals a flaw in McReady's scheme, and they have to
scramble to save the situation (it's just the sort of fast-moving,
quick-thinking action Hawks might have staged, if he had the money
and technology available).
For
its finale the action moves out of the base and into the alien
ship--and here the picture practically buries a pickaxe into its boot.
The idea of an alien loose in fairly familiar surrounding--an
Antarctic base--is at the very core of the original's appeal; even when
earlier films set the action in outer space, they were careful to
give their hallways an industrial-factory look, complete with
pipelines and leaking steam valves (Ridley Scott's Alien,
1979). An alien ship by its very nature is exotic, threatening;
you're so primed to see every odd shape, every dark shadow as disguised menace that when
the creature itself finally appears you don't feel any sense of escalation
(the best disguise, of course, being a simple shadow). You need the
contrast.
By
story's end the prequel attaches itself smoothly and effortlessly
into the beginning of Carpenter's film--and here you wonder if you
aren't seeing the core problem of the whole production. It's so
obsessed with dovetailing with the better film, with
'reverse-engineering' what happened at the Norwegian base, that the
movie's plot is seriously distorted, a case of confused priorities; it wants to be consistent when its first duty is to be entertaining,
and imaginative. At best this serves as a case study of why one
film is better than its successor; at worse it's like a monstrous
outgrowth of the creature itself, more eager to mimic and meld than
it is to develop its own identity, be its own creature.
First published in Businessworld, 11.3.11
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