Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Thing / USA / 1982

Not only does The Thing feature one of the best casts of early ’80s character actors ever (spearheaded by Mr. Kurt Russell and featuring an unusually agile and unmustachioed Wilford Brimley), it’s also an across-the-board improvement on the film it remakes (1951’s The Thing from Another World) and was later dumbed down and amped up to make no less a film than Predator. This combination of superficial elements would itself be enough to make me geek out embarrassingly on the internet, but the film is also smart, well-made, gross, and bloody scary. It’s also that rarest of films, even in the macho movieworld, that features exactly zero women.

What’s consistently winning about John Carpenter, suggested perhaps by his wholly apt surname, is the workmanlike air his films have. Never the highest budgeted or most specially effected, Carpenter’s films nonetheless work because they work hard: in acting, in mise-en-scene, in defying expectation. To this latter end, the titular Thing arises in strange, unanticipated intervals (it pops up in the darnedest of places), but never appears in any “original” state because, quite simply, it has none. It is always a copy of another organism. The Thing is in fact not a thing, its chief attribute its lack of thingy-ness.

Because the Thing’s weapon is its ability to simulate, genuineness is something the viewer looks for in the protagonists, only definitively finding it in Kurt Russell. Thus, when we are given evidence that Kurt might be the Thing, our moviewatching instincts tell us otherwise: we can read his character, so we know he isn’t the Thing. Similarly, we rarely know when precisely the other characters are infected. The film relies so much on credibility in acting that we’re never quite sure that what we see as a fleeting lack of credibility in the acting is a slippage of the actor or of the Thing.

Rumsey’s review.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Universal Pictures DVD
13 Mar 2007 4:24 PM | Submit Comment