When I first saw this movie, as a kid, I found it kind of scary. Watching it last night on TCM, however, I was underwhelmed. The sets are primitive, the acting is hammy, and James Arness as The Thing was just pathetic. He looked like Frankenstein's Monster in a wet suit. Worse, however, was the total disregard for scientific and technical accuracy. In fact, by the end of the movie I concluded that "The Thing" contains more errors of this nature than any other movie made ever!
*** SPOILERS !!! ***
To start with the obvious, the movie is set at or very near the North Pole, in November when it's dark outside 24 hours a day. Even at 80 degrees North latitude, there are less than two hours of daylight on November 3. Yet the crew that sets out to find the crashed spacecraft seems to have quite a lot of daylight to work in.
There are no airlocks on the doors to the polar station; people just waltz in and out. The sled dogs are left out at night (which would be always) even though someone mentions a temperature of 60 below.
The crashed spacecraft is described as weighing 20,000 tons, and affecting compasses for hundreds of miles around. That sounds like a lot of metal, but battleships weigh a lot more than that and compasses work just fine even when one is nearby.
Based on sizes and weights of other aircraft, a 20,000 ton disk-shaped spaceship would be about 300 feet across larger if it were made of something like titanium. Yet when the search party fans out and stands around the ship's perimeter it is only about a 100-ft circle. A ship that size would weigh a few hundred tons at most. Why didn't they just describe the crashed object as "highly magnetic" and have the file get irrevocably stuck to the tail fin when one guy tries to file off shavings?
Attempting to thaw out the ice surrounding the ship with a couple of thermite charges simply wouldn't work. Those charges could melt a few cubic yards of ice, at most. And what were they hoping to accomplish, anyhow? Assuming they could melt the ice, what are they gonna do? Dive into ice-cold water, in the Arctic winter, to look at the ship close-up? almost certainly, they would have radioed back to civilization and the higher-ups would have told them not to disturb anything. Then, come Spring, there would be a major scientific expedition equipped with excavating equipment and sophisticated instruments.
There wasn't even any good plot-related reason to try to excavate the ship from the ice. They could have discovered The Thing nearby anyway, and used the thermite to get HIM out of the ice. The amount they had might be enough. Instead, they remove a block of ice that had to weigh at least 3000 pounds, using hand tools and perhaps chainsaws. This would take at least a day, yet apparently it takes them almost no time.
When the crew gets the block of ice back to the station, they bring it inside. Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to leave it outside? Who's gonna steal it?
Once it's inside they put it in a storeroom, where some bozo inadvertently places an electric blanket on top of the ice. This would have almost no effect on a 3000 pound block of ice in a cold room; it would take months to melt the block this way.
Once The Thing is on the loose, they try to stop it by sloshing kerosene on it and setting it afire inside their only shelter. Yeah, that's a really good plan.
When The Thing disrupts the fuel supply to the heaters that keep the station warm, they come up with another great plan: electrocute him. OK, what does the generator run on: pixie dust? Wouldn't it be hooked in to the same fuel source as the heaters? If not, why couldn't they use some of the generator fuel to heat the place for a few hours?
The setup they devise to electrocute The Thing is ludicrous. For something like that to work, he'd have to be in direct contact with the wires carrying the electrical current yet they put the floor grid under a wood walkway (wood is a fairly good insulator) and run some wires along the walls and ceiling. One of the characters says something about stepping up the voltage (using what?) to allow the electricity to arc across to The Thing. "That'll provide plenty of amps," he says. Wrong.
When you step up the voltage, amperage drops correspondingly. To form arcs that long would take about half a million volts. If the polar station was equipped with a 100 KW generator, that would give you about 0.2 amperes barely enough to tickle. (Remember those Van de Graf generators at high school science fairs? Big sparks, but totally harmless!) To provide high amperage, you'd reduce the voltage but then you'd have to get the monster to actually touch the wires, and there'd be no cool sparks to look at.
Oh, and one final question; If The Thing had come to Earth to plant his seeds and grow an army of Things, why would he be cruising around the North Pole? Wouldn't he be likely to head for a tropical jungle region, where the climate is more conducive to plant growth and there is a plentiful supply of food?
Geez.
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