Polar Excess

Our look at the shape of Things gone by continues as we look, with some degree of inevitability, at John Carpenter’s 1982 version of the famous story. This is a movie which was a fairly spectacular flop on its original release, marking the end of Carpenter’s time in the top flight of Hollywood directors, but the years and word-of-mouth have been very kind to it and these days it can boast an enviable reputation.

Certainly, when I was but a lad, The Thing was the subject of much awed discussion around school – said discussions mainly revolving around whether you were hard enough to watch it all the way through without crying or being sick. ‘What about that bit where it comes out of the dog!’ was a commonly-heard utterance, spoken in a tone of awed disbelief.

Lacking in physical, moral, or intellectual courage, this sort of thing put me off a bit and I managed to avoid seeing the film all the way through until many years later – although a TV documentary on the history of special make-up effects helpfully introduced me to most of the key sequences. And then when I did see it, it was a hacked-about TV edit that really did the coherence of the movie no favours.

What I’m really trying to say here is that I’ve always had a slightly ambivalent attitude towards this film and wasn’t particularly impressed when I eventually caught up with it. If it weren’t for the release of the 2011 remake I probably wouldn’t have gone back to it at all. However, more than once in the past it was only on the second viewing that I really understood when a film was coming from. And in this case…?

Hmmm. Winter, 1982, and the personnel at a US research outpost in Antarctica (quite what they are researching is never made clear, but they are well-provisioned with flamethrowers, dynamite, roller-skates and Stevie Wonder tapes) are surprised to find their camp receiving an unscheduled visit from some Norwegians from down the way. The Norwegians are frantically shooting and lobbing bombs at a dog, for reasons which are not immediately apparent, and not being especially good at this sort of thing it does not end well for them: one of them blows himself up and the other is shot dead by one of the Americans on health and safety grounds.

The outpost’s chopper pilot, MacReady (Kurt Russell), wisely attempts to discover what the Norwegians were up to, while the rest of the camp, unwisely, adopts the dog. MacReady visits the Norwegians’ own base and find it in ruins, uninhabited except for a team of researchers making notes for the prequel. He also discovers videotapes of the Scandinavians re-enacting scenes from the 1951 version of the story.

The Norwegians discovered an alien ship entombed in the ice, and the frozen remains of an occupant not far away. The alien, it appears, thawed out and wreaked terrible havoc before being incinerated. But why were the last two survivors so fixated on shooting the dog…?

Well, once again I must put my hand up: whether you view this film as an account of a terrifying incursion by a hostile extraterrestrial life-form, or simply an unfortunate misunderstanding between an innocent alien missionary and some limited and ignorant Terran bipeds, this is a film which demands to be taken seriously.

One can kind of see why the film was so negatively reviewed on its original release – I can barely imagine the effect watching it would have if you went in completely unsuspecting what awaited you. Famously, it came out on the same weekend as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial – now that’s what I call providing consumer choice! – and there’s no question as to which film has wider appeal: all The Thing wants to do is freak you out and mess you up, offering only the faintest grace notes of humour and hope throughout its running time.

The most striking aspect of The Thing is the creature itself. The sequences where it physically manifests are, to put it mildly, memorable – although there are only a handful of these moments in the film, they brand themselves into your memory and you come away thinking there are far more than is actually the case. It’s the inventiveness of their conception as much as their visceral goriness which make them work as well as they do – even after multiple viewings, the defibrilator moment and its aftermath is still an astounding feat of film-making.

Even this, though, is made possible by the concept of the Thing itself – a form of life so utterly alien and different that it almost defies description. The Thing operates like a viral infection more than a traditional in-the-flesh monster, and it’s this that makes it so frightening. The film strongly suggests that individuals infected/replicated by the entity aren’t even aware of the fact – even that its powers of mimicry extend to features such as psychological flaws and weak hearts. Is the Thing even conscious, as we understand the idea? Does it have an agenda of any kind? Quite properly, we are left to ponder.

However, The Thing is an 109-minute film, and – although I haven’t got my stopwatch out – I would be surprised if the entity itself is doing its spectacularly disgusting thing on-screen for a tenth of that time. The gore freak-outs are really just punctuation points in a story which for much of its running time relies on atmosphere and character to keep the audience gripped.

Kurt Russell gives the performance of his career as MacReady, but there’s a terrific ensemble performance from everyone involved – Keith David gives an eye-catching turn, and there’s solid support from veterans like Wilford Brimley and Richard Dysart. The developing narrative of the film, and with it the increasing distrust and paranoia between the members of the team, is relentless – as it surely had to be – and very tightly focussed.

For most of its length, this is an intensely economical film – another reason why the pyrotechnic excesses of the special effects are so striking. Even Ennio Morricone’s score eschews lavish arrangements for a very spare theme which, to be honest, strongly suggests the great man is pastiching the style of John Carpenter’s own compositions!

One thing that The Thing doesn’t do is try too hard to ape the 1951 version of the story – the full-body burn sequence from the original is recreated, and the Norwegians’ home video shows them repeating a key scene, but that’s really it. The conflict between the military and scientific philosophies and the close camaraderie of the human characters are both completely absent. I say this not as a criticism, because I think every film’s first objective should be to work on its own terms, and surely one of the reasons why The Thing works as well as it does is because it isn’t afraid to follow its own path.

Well, no matter what the quality of the new Thing is, it has at least made me come back and look again at this version, and I’m very glad I did. This still isn’t my favourite John Carpenter movie – for which, see 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 – but it seems positively perverse that such an accomplished and impressive movie was so badly received that it effectively crippled his career. And as to whether it’s better than The Thing from Another World… I don’t know. I have such a fondness for that movie, and the two are so different. But the next time someone tells me that The Thing is a classic of both horror and SF film-making, I will happily agree with them.