Just watched this today, bank holiday, check, raining, check, what a great way to pass the afternoon, right ? NO.
Setting aside mixed metaphors such as the one above, this was very disappointing and i don't enjoy having to report this, but its the truth.
The dialogue ranges from functional, just about moves along the plot, to banal, "i think......", "I Didn't BRING YOU HERE TO THINK !"
The beginning was reasonable enough, then it was all downhill, the characters had no character, the story just replicated the events of the original 1982 movie (maybe the writers are The Thing ?) , the oral hygiene scene played out virtually identically to the wire in the blood scene from John Carpenter's movie.
Except that in terms of suspense the new movie had done nothing to earn it by that point, when that scene came around in the 82 version, you had a sense of the characters, there had been clues as to who may or may not have been the Thing.
There had been cut away scenes to establish isolated characters, plot points (who had the key to the blood cabinet?), offending underwear with certain peoples names stitched into it, found in incriminating places.
Here the Thing not only manifests itself in bright, well lit places, in full view of, oh, pretty much everyone, it attacks and pursues people and every incarnation of it in this movie was virtually the same creature.
The only two notable exceptions were the stretched face guy, (the one taken back to the American camp in the 82 version) and the one they confront at the end, (which looks a hell of a lot like one of the original conception drawings i saw in an old issue of Fangoria back in 82).
All this does is to negate any need it has to hide and replicate others as well as it can, thats its natural defence mechanism, paranoia does the rest. Which really undermines the whole "who goes there ?" concept. Thats where the suspense and dare i say, fun of the original starts from. There's no wow factor, today of "how on earth did they achieve that effect", like the defibrillator scene in the original, its now replaced with instantly recognisable cgi, which destroys all movie magic.
This film adds nothing of any consequence to the overall concept of the Thing, that the original 1982 version already covered, so why make it, it spends the last twenty minutes scrupulously setting up the original, which is the one thing it does really well (hence 2/10).
Except the axe in the door, the reason its there in the new movie, seems to miss that in the original when MacReady pushes through that door there are objects barricading it on the opposite side, as if someone was trying to break through that door, possibly to the slashed wrists guy in the next room.
Overall i didn't enjoy it and its a shame, because i wanted to and i tried to give it a chance. But it just repeated instead of expanding, there was no suspense, just cheap jumps, the dialogue wasn't naturalistic (like the original), the characters were characterless and the creature didn't come close to matching the originality of the Rob Bottin version. I still think something interesting could be done with the Thing concept, this wasn't it and i smelt studio meddling in this movie all the way through it.
Setting aside mixed metaphors such as the one above, this was very disappointing and i don't enjoy having to report this, but its the truth.
The dialogue ranges from functional, just about moves along the plot, to banal, "i think......", "I Didn't BRING YOU HERE TO THINK !"
The beginning was reasonable enough, then it was all downhill, the characters had no character, the story just replicated the events of the original 1982 movie (maybe the writers are The Thing ?) , the oral hygiene scene played out virtually identically to the wire in the blood scene from John Carpenter's movie.
Except that in terms of suspense the new movie had done nothing to earn it by that point, when that scene came around in the 82 version, you had a sense of the characters, there had been clues as to who may or may not have been the Thing.
There had been cut away scenes to establish isolated characters, plot points (who had the key to the blood cabinet?), offending underwear with certain peoples names stitched into it, found in incriminating places.
Here the Thing not only manifests itself in bright, well lit places, in full view of, oh, pretty much everyone, it attacks and pursues people and every incarnation of it in this movie was virtually the same creature.
The only two notable exceptions were the stretched face guy, (the one taken back to the American camp in the 82 version) and the one they confront at the end, (which looks a hell of a lot like one of the original conception drawings i saw in an old issue of Fangoria back in 82).
All this does is to negate any need it has to hide and replicate others as well as it can, thats its natural defence mechanism, paranoia does the rest. Which really undermines the whole "who goes there ?" concept. Thats where the suspense and dare i say, fun of the original starts from. There's no wow factor, today of "how on earth did they achieve that effect", like the defibrillator scene in the original, its now replaced with instantly recognisable cgi, which destroys all movie magic.
This film adds nothing of any consequence to the overall concept of the Thing, that the original 1982 version already covered, so why make it, it spends the last twenty minutes scrupulously setting up the original, which is the one thing it does really well (hence 2/10).
Except the axe in the door, the reason its there in the new movie, seems to miss that in the original when MacReady pushes through that door there are objects barricading it on the opposite side, as if someone was trying to break through that door, possibly to the slashed wrists guy in the next room.
Overall i didn't enjoy it and its a shame, because i wanted to and i tried to give it a chance. But it just repeated instead of expanding, there was no suspense, just cheap jumps, the dialogue wasn't naturalistic (like the original), the characters were characterless and the creature didn't come close to matching the originality of the Rob Bottin version. I still think something interesting could be done with the Thing concept, this wasn't it and i smelt studio meddling in this movie all the way through it.