If you are not excited about The Thing, then you are the Thing and must be purged

Cafe Society
41

They could certainly go that route. In one of the original scripts of the 1982 movie (and they might have filmed this in fact, but not included it), one of the dogs is seen wandering off into the wilderness at the very end. Presumably, it’s an escaped Thing.

Going by what we see in the 1982 movie, we don’t really know what ultimately happened to every person and animal of the Norwegian camp. This new film, the prequel, could show somebody, human or Thing or unknown, getting away and making it back to civilization.

42

That wasnt me, I was in the lab the whole day.

43

Quick, someone tie Capitaine to the couch and get a blood sample!

44

Hilarious alternative ending:

“My God! This THING just got up and walked away.”

“No, HU-mans, I am right here. I have come from antoher world looking for the greatest delicacy of all… and you have it.”

“Oh no, he’s going to eat us all nom nnom nom!”

“What? Are you guys siuck or something? I was your Kibbles-n-Bits. God, every bloody time I try to get dinner, some nut who’s been stuck here 8 months freaks out and gets a blowtorch.”

Movie over in ten. :smiley:

45

IIRC from Barlowe’s Guide To Extraterrestrials, the Thing’s true form had tentacles, blue skin, three red eyes and a mouth full of needle teeth.

RE Infection

Of course the Thing duplicates and infects. If there was only one thing, burning (I suck at remembering names) Chiles (the guy they find who is all done imitating human except for monster hands) would have killed the monster and ended the movie. There are several points in the film at which more than one human has become or is in the process of becoming a thing.

Even Mac realizes this. ‘If such a small amount can infect, we should all prepare our meals ourselves- and we should only eat from cans.’

Besides which, the last Thing we see (The one Mac throws dynamite at and yells “Fuck you too!”) is huge. It is at least equal in biomass to several humans. We have previously seen that the Thing can split (the head that becomes a spider/crab thing. Blood trying to run from a hot needle). Even if you were right (and you are not) about the Thing only being able to duplicate one person at a time, by the end of the film it has gained sufficient mass to split and duplicate several people at a time.

The Thing only attacks when it has no choice (like during the blood testing scene) or when it has an overwhelming advantage. It’s original plan seems to be to infect everybody and wait. Why battle it out when a stray dog can lick people’s faces and turn the whole base?

BTW

Besides the videogame (which I’ve only recently got the hardware to run), there were several limited series from Dark Horse Comics. I avoided these as they were based on the premise that Mac and a thing reach civilization after the film ends.

46

[QUOTE=DocCathode]

IIRC from Barlowe’s Guide To Extraterrestrials, the Thing’s true form had tentacles, blue skin, three red eyes and a mouth full of needle teeth.

[/quote]

I have that very book, and they do show it that way, calling this its “natural form”. But it never has that form in the film, so I don’t what the artist based his illustration on.

That’s Bennings. Childs is the guy who makes it to the end with MacReady. Or apparently makes it anyway.

Yes, exactly. I can’t think of anything in the film which suggests the Thing is constrained to occupy only one organism at a time.

Minor nit: it’s Fuchs who says that (in a conversation with Mac).

47

I assume it’s based on the original story Who Goes There.

48

SPOILER’S AHEAD! LOOK AWAY IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW!
Just got back from the theater, and I must admit I’m a little disappointed. This is not a bad movie, IMO, it’s just that it’s been done before, and better.

This newest version is an almost scene-for-scene copy of Carpenter’s (there are some differences) for the first half, and the last half is more like Alien in the Antarctic.

The Good: they did do a pretty decent job of representing the in-fighting and paranoia. They adhered pretty faithfully to the various Things that got killed off, and were later discovered by Mac and Doc Copper. Also, their method of identifying the Thing was pretty slick, even if it had a few pitfalls. They may have worked up to the ad-hoc blood test Mac devised in Carpenter’s movie; you could see “the wheels turning” behind the eyes of the various non-Thing camp personnel, but events pressed forward before they had time to think of it

The Not-So-Good: the Swedish (Norwegian, Tank! They’re Norwegian!) weren’t really developed much as characters. In Carpenter’s classic, everyone got at least a few lines that sort of helped establish them as characters, as people. Ironically, for me at least, the monoglot “Lars” was one of the few sympathetic characters. The man had a well-honed survival instinct. At least until he walked off alone to investigate a noise and got himself Thingamized. Dumbass.

Also, the CGI-Things just seemed to lack the substance of Carpenter’s.

And the dialogue was definitely missing “quoteables,” such as Gary’s rant about being tied to a couch all winter, or Palmer’s disbelieving outburst at seeing Norris’s head detach and go skittering away on spider legs. And no one matched Mac’s tough guy/ordinary hero pragmatism; the list goes on.

The Really “Off-Note(s):” having adhered pretty faithfully to the camp layout and the disposition as it was found by Mac and Doc Copper in Carpenter’s movie, the film makers deliberately overlooked the fact that the Swedes had excavated the alien starship using some sort of explosive charges. We see this in the video tapes Doc Copper salvaged from the Norwegian camp. Yet in this remake, the craft is still buried until the Sanders-Thing goes back to it to try to escape (to where is unspecified, but I assume off-planet). It’s the ship’s engines which brings down the ice-roof covering the alien starship.

Which begs the question: if the ship was still viable, why did the original-Thing leave it to get itself frozen on the ice?

Also: MEW’s character is just left sitting in a snow cat at the alien ship crash site. Did she just die? Freeze to death? Wouldn’t Mac and Doc Copper have spotted her, or at least the two bright yellow snow cats, when they went to investigate the ship site (after bringing the videos back from the Norwegian camp and looking over the research material they salvaged)? In real time, it’s been ~30 years; in movie time it’s not definite, but it couldn’t have been more than 24 - 48 hours.

So: not a bad movie, and despite a few p(l)otholes, segues nicely into Carpenter’s, but just a little more detail to continuity and dialogue could’ve made this a much better (even if still eminently predictable) movie.

49

I basically agree. It’s not a bad film, as the RT score implies, it’s just nothing special, particularly when compared to the original. I thought the CGI was a little too obvious, the Thing itself looked too goofy at point to take seriously (like having the giant human head toward the end), and it was simply far too visible far too often…

In fact, the movie wasn’t really scary at all, or even that tense. The only scene that I thought did a good job–at first at least–was when that one dude was hiding from the Thing (in a kitchen, maybe?) as it slowly ventures into the room, with only the sounds tipping off what it’s doing. The movie needed more scenes like that.

And the characters, as mentioned, weren’t fleshed out–I kept getting confused as to who was who, since their personalities were mostly interchangeable, based on the little we saw. Plus they acted very silly at points, like when the main girl–immediately after noting that the Thing can appear human–goes to have a chat
with another girl in a dark corner…who just so happens to be the Thing.

I did like how well it ties into the original, but was disappointed they weren’t 100% faithful, as ExTank noted with the excavation.

All in all, not bad, but not great either.

50

Oh, and another thing (heh) that bugged me…I sort of liked the idea that it can’t create inorganic matter…except for the fact that it doesn’t make sense, particularly for the first movie…where did the Thing get those clothes then?

51

Obligatory reference to the story The Things, by Peter Watts. It tells the story from the Thing’s POV, interestingly. (At least to my mind it was interesting)

52

It wears a lot of natural fibers.

But seriously, I don’t think the creature in the original film was duplicating people’s clothing. Once it consumed and replaced someone, it just found some of their clothes and put them on.

53

Question. Has any of the people going on about “the original Thing” actually see the original? There is no shape shifting, or taking over bodies that I can recall.

54

By original do you mean the original story Who Goes There, the black and white film, or James Carpenter’s film?

55

If you mean the Howard Hawkes film, yes, of course. It’s got a lot to recommend it, but I always felt that the James Arness “carrot from space” monster fell a little flat. He never seemed all that menacing to me. It’s been years and years since I’ve seen it, though, so it’s probably worth checking it out again to see if my perspective’s changed.

I’ve never read “Who Goes There?” which is something else I should rectify one of these days.

56

But isn’t the clothing it wears the same as the people were wearing before? I also suspect the other people on base would notice a bunch of naked coworkers running around all the time…

57

In the one case where we see someone right before they’re taken by the thing, and immediately after their transformation, no. When Bennings and Windows are in the storage room with the “dead” creature found at Norwegian camp, Bennings is wearing an orange vest and a dark shirt. When Windows comes back, he sees the shirt and vest, shredded and covered in blood, and a similarly gore-soaked, shirtless Bennings wrapped in tentacles. When they catch the partially transformed Bennings out in the snow, he’s wearing a hooded parka, zipped up so you can’t see if he has a shirt on underneath. It looks to me like the pants are different as well, but it’s hard to tell. Since Bennings was killed in a store room, it’s likely there were spare parkas and snow pants available to the creature there.

The creature doesn’t really take over that many people in the course of the film. Not counting the interrupted attack on Bennings, there’s really only ever three apparent humans who are actually monsters, and we have a pretty good idea where two of them were killed.

We don’t actually see the first human to be taken over, just his shadow, so it’s not clear who it was, but he was sitting in his bedroom at the time, so plenty of access to his clothes after he’s killed by the dog-thing. This was either Norris (who was revealed when he suffered an apparent heart attack), or Palmer (who was caught out by the hot wire test while tied to the couch). The third victim was Blair, who was turned while he was locked up in the shack after he destroyed the radio. Blair had a lot of supplies in the shack with him, probably including spare clothes, as it was clear they intended to keep him locked up in there for some time. That just leaves one possible naked guy running around, and for all we know, somebody did see him. We never found out what killed Fuchs, after all. Maybe he immolated himself after seeing a stark naked Palmer running around.

58

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film…are all the examples you gave of people who were seen immediately before being taken over by the thing? If so, I’m not sure that’s a necessary requirement. Doesn’t the movie take course over the span of a day or so? Once they found out about the monster, I very much doubt any of them would change clothing, which should expand the amount of reference material we have substantially.

59

Here ya go.

60

I don’t recall shape changing in the story Who Goes There? or the film The Thing From Another World.