The Thing
Most people like John Carpenter's The Thing, but I'm not one of them. I can imagine the early script meetings:
PRODUCER 1: "Everybody liked Alien. Make it more like Alien."
SCREENWRITER: "Well, uh, we want it to be original, so—"
PRODUCER 2: "Yeah, that chest-burster scene really got 'em. Let's do something like that."
PRODUCER 3: "I got it! Instead of the thing coming out of the chest, we'll make it come out of the guy's belly."
PRODUCER 2: "Hah! A belly-burster! I love it!"
SCREENWRITER: "Guys, that's a little derivative. Maybe we should just--"
PRODUCER 1: "--and let's put teeth in the guy's belly. Give him a big gut, and before the monster even comes out, his belly can eat the other dude's head."
PRODUCER 2: "The belly eats the guy's head! I love it! Write that up, and let's see it by tomorrow, ok?"
SCREENWRITER: Sigh.
Just so no one gets confused about The Thing being bigger and better than Alien, the monster that comes out of Vance's belly is outrageously tentacled and huge, and not only that, Vance's head pops off. It turns into a spider-thing with eyes on stalks. There are no rules about what this alien can or cannot do, so the storytelling is diffuse and unstructured. There is no increase in suspense and tension because they don't learn much about the creature's limitations and how to combat them. The stakes and consequences for the crew stay the same throughout. What little they do learn about the alien (that it can infect them) they ignore. Like the monster's incarnations in the movie, it's a bloody mess.
Now let's talk about the weather. Boring, right? Not in this film, where the weather could kill as easily as the monsters. MacReady (played by Kurt Russel) tells viewers in one of the daytime scenes that the temperature is -40°. Later, at night, he mentions that once the flames go out, the temperature will fall to -100°. But not to worry. MacReady is magic. He wears a light bomber jacket in every outdoor scene and is often bare-headed, except when he wears a hoodie. Many of the other men run around with their jackets opened and heads uncovered, too. This wouldn't cut it--they would have quickly gotten frostbitten ears and noses in temperatures like these. At the very least. Because of this lack of verisimilitude, I was never able to buy into the film's setting of Antarctica. Instead, I felt like I was watching a movie set.
Speaking of running around, there is a lot of it. Men run from room to room, in groups, Keystone Cops-like, looking for this and looking for that, calling to each other, "Hey guys, come here." They react emotionally, often with fists, rather than reason out practical solutions. At risk of becoming infected by the alien, they never institute sanitary protocols, but instead thoughtlessly endanger themselves. After poking around with a swab in the entrails of the husky-dog monster while performing an autopsy, Dr. Blair, played by Wilford Brimley with no mustache, absently taps the bloody swab on his lips. (Even Dr. Birx would chastise a pathologist over such behavior.) When Mac makes the men surrender drops of their blood to be tested, they take turns passing the same scalpel to each other without sterilizing it between cuts. Windows, at least, makes an effort—he wipes it on his pants. Perhaps it is the current pandemic that makes me so aware of these failings, but failings they are, and it is difficult to root for these bumbling men. One crew member alerts Mac that he needs to tell him something important. Mac replies that he's tired of talking and just wants to go up to his shack and get drunk. If he doesn't care, why should I?
Dr. Blair escapes from the shack where he's been imprisoned. While searching for him, the men come upon a flying saucer that he has partially built out of spare helicopter parts. Spare helicopter parts that just happen to have pieces that fit together precisely the right way to form the circular shape of a saucer. Again, credulity is strained.
The crew's response to the threat is to fight the monster with fire, and they learn that fire kills it. There is no development beyond this—the film is strategically plotless with no surprises. Fire in the beginning, fire at the end. Eventually, they blow up the station. Mac and Childs, sole survivors with no shelter left, are resigned to their imminent deaths in the Antarctic night. Mac still isn't wearing a hat.
There are a few things I like about The Thing. Window's sunglasses, for one. The men are hippie holdovers who refer to each other as "man," pass joints around, and wear denim jackets with the sleeves ripped off. There is one fantastic line: “I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s weird and it’s pissed off.”
The monster effects are realistic and creative—like the eyes in the middle of the husky dog-monster's body. I liked the transformation of Vance's head, especially when it propels itself by extending tentacles to grasp the table leg. There is an excellent jump-scare near the film’s conclusion when the floor rolls and undulates, then gives way to a colossal monster made out of several of the men and dogs.
PRODUCER 1: "We should save one of the animals at the end, like Ripley's cat."
PRODUCER 2: "Nah, no one gave a crap about that stupid cat. Let's kill all the dogs. They can be part of the monster that pops out of the floor!"
SCREENWRITER: Sigh.