Maybe I’m not even qualified to ask this question, since I got the heebie-jeebies after the kennel scene and had to turn the movie off. But this keeps bugging me:
Why was the alien trying to turn itself into a dog when it was already in the form of a dog?
Either it was careless writing or the reason therefor was revealed later in the movie.
Also, just an observation: this is really a hard plot to improve on, isn’t it? The original 1950’s movie is one of my favorite of the genre, and Alien is my absolute favorite of the genre. It took watching the old one to realize that Alien was largely based on it.
But wow, I just couldn’t take this one. It’s a good story, but it just got too horrifying and gruesome for me. Maybe someday I’ll take a deep breath and watch the rest of it. Does it get worse than the kennel scene?
There are a lot of fans of this movie here so someone will probably happen along more qualified than I but… wasn’t it just trying to infect the other dogs in the kennel scene? My understanding was that there isn’t just one “Thing” but numerous individual “Things” that had outwardly replicated their host. That’s why they could kill one but still be in danger.
Oh, and you gotta see the rest of the show. It only has a few gory scenes but becomes more of a tense mystery as to who’s infected and who’s at risk.
I don’t know that your question really amounts to a spoiler, as that scene happens early in the movie and isn’t a major plot point. I think the Thing wasn’t trying to imitate the dogs; it was trying to infect them with itself in order to reproduce. I don’t remember the dialogue that followed the scene clearly enough; Blair does mention the Thing imitating the dogs, but he may be autopsying an infected dog, not the “original” Thing.
Exactly how the Thing functions biologically is a little murky, I admit, and some scenes were obviously staged more for the shock and gore factor than for logic.
The TThing wasn’t trying to turn itself into a dog – it was trying to take over the dog and make it another Thing (or another piece of THe Thing). It’s not like there’s only so much “Thing” mass – it propagates itself and sort of reproduces by “infecting” other organisms and, cell by cell, changing them into the same biochemistry and (one assumes) the same mind as itself.
I like the Carpenter versionm, with its script by Bill Lancaster (Burt’s son). It’s much more faithful to the John Campbell short story both versions are ostensibly based on. But ity’s bloodier/grosser. And for some reason they took what has an optimistic, happy ending and turned it into a dark, dismal ambiguous one. Read the story “Who Goes There?” if you get a chance. It’s in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame(Vol. 1), Adventures in Time and Space and The Best of John Campbell, among others.
If you’ll remember, the Wilford Brimley character ran some predictive calculations on how fast the organism/mechanism could spread throughout the general population. The amout of time he came up with, whatever it was, could only have been accomplished by the Thing propagating itself and not through one to one to one linear contact.
As I’ve maintained many times on this Board, Alien bears a much closer resemblance to the underappreciated 1950s SF film It! The Terror from Beyond Space, written by Jerome Bixby (much better known for writing “It’s a Good Life” , which was made into a super-creepy Twilight Zone episode.) – Alien creature gets broght aboard a space ship, gets around via the air-circulating system, slowly kills off the crew one by one , and is finally done in
…when tyhe crew opens the airlock. Only in this case it suffocates, instead of getting sucked out.
Cinefantastique noted the similarities, too, and suggested some inspiration as well from Planet of Vampires (Giant skeleton of alien pilot in derelict alien space ship) and Night of the Blood Beast (Alien implants embryos in crewman).
I’ve no doubt that Bixby knew of “Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet”, two of the stories by A. E. Van Vogt that were eventually “fixed up” into the book Voyage of the Space Beagle, but I think his work is significantly different from those, as is Alien. But he probably got some inspiration from it.
What made me think Alien was based on The Thing was the use of the “radar” or movement sensing device which was used to show that the critter was extremely near, but no one could see it until it was right in their face.
A detail of similarity, but not enough. Having a geiger counter tell you the Thing is coming closer is a very effect way to build suspense.
In Alien, the thing detects “micro-changes in air density” (!!WTF? The thing would constantly be going off! Let’s just accept that it’s a Magical Monster Detector), but it never seems good enough to be any use. When Captain Dallas fgoes into the air ducts, they tell him the monster’s coming, but not from which direction. Talk about useless! The use of the gimmick in Christian Nyby’s/Howard Hawks’ 1951 version makes sense. The use in Alien makes me wish the crew of the Nostromo outta the gene pool.
And no such device exists in the Carpenter film. Or in any of the print stories that do or may have been inspiration.
You know, I’ve always thought all the hard sci-fi elements of the story (growth/reproduction rates, the bits about the science of the injection that would reveal the creature - sorry, I don’t remember the details) were pure window dressing. I’ve always viewed it as a very pure Lovecraftian story (and as such, one of the best movies of that genre.) It has the formless crawling chaos, the devilish cleverness of shape-changing, the insidious corruption of its host. The Thing is a perfect Nyarlathotep, or a spawn of Azathoth, or a shoggoth.
As such, it doesn’t really matter why it’s trying to turn into a dog…it’s following its own twisted, horrible agenda to become free and reclaim the earth for the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods.
Just IMHO, but I think we need to seperate the movies from the original short story.
Remember, in the original, the alien was super-intelligent and was destroyed just short of using an anti-gravity device that would have allowed it to escape the Antarctic and roam free through the world.
Neither film put this into the plot, and to me, they must remain something like “Inspired by the short story”…
I would sure like to see a true treatment of the original in film. Don’t think it’s gonna happen, though, any more than I think I will ever live to see “Voyage of the Space Beagle” rendered faithfully unto cinema.
Anywho, The Thing is one of the few Carpenter films I actually like, and, like Ogre, I assume the alien is doing stuff for its own alien reasons which wouldn’t make apparent sense to humans.
I was already older than a teenager when I saw it, but it made me wish I was a member of the Academy, so I could nominate that actor for some kind of award.
I wonder what the director told him his motivation was…
The scene where the doctor uses the defibrilator on the infected crewman, for starters. ;j