I’ve always assumed that Blair changed into something to help dig the hole.
And I like the Blair self-exposure hypothesis. Could be. That’s one of the things (no pun) I love about the movie, it’s open-ended nature; there are many unanswered questions.
I agree. The only thing the audience really needs to know is that anybody could be a “thing”.
It’s certainly possible to make a good movie where you know in general how it’s going to end. “Apollo 13” is a great, great movie even if you know the history.
But “The Thing” remake, meh. The CGI was definitely a problem, and they just showed too much of the Thing. You have to hide the monster a lot.
I played that. I quit when I found that the whether they became “Things” or not was basically predetermined. What? That’s a foundation of the game! I’m done.
Apollo 13 was never about the outcome, though; it was a drama about people coming together in a time of crisis to find a solution. It quite frankly follows the “sports movie” model in how the plot beats and elements lay out, and it never tries to pretend that there are any surprises.
A horror film—and especially survival horror—is all about surprise. In Alien the drama comes from the fact that (as a first time viewer) you have no idea who is going to survive; the ship’s captain and only major star at the time was killed off before the halfway point of the movie. In The Thing, we know that all the Norwegians are killed, and we know what the Thing is and what it can do, so there are zero surprises in the prequel even notwithstanding the poorly integrated CGI effects. It is a story that really doesn’t beg to be told because everything we needed to know about it has already been exposited in the original film. If it were a character drama and there were compelling performances then maybe there would be something worthwhile in the film, but despite the decent casting nobody really stands out except for Mary Elizabeth Winstead doing a poor imitation of MacReady and the other actors in stock character roles, so there is just nothing interesting about the film.
Stranger
While I agree 99% with @Stranger_On_A_Train, there were a few beats in the prequel that, if they had been willing to take more risks, could have been fun.
One thing that worked in the original is the unknown, that anyone around you could be one of them, and until tested/broke cover, you had nothing but your paranoia to protect you. So, I thought if the prequel wanted to bring something ‘new’ to the table, there would have to be at least one scene where everyone decided X was a monster and killed them, only to be WRONG.
We then could see the horrible corrosive effect of the paranoia eating away at them, which would have added a newer element of human drama. And for a half-second, I thought they’d go with that in the closing scenes (leaving details out for spoilers), but they didn’t.
So the prequel had major retreads, weaker story, weaker characters, and mediocre (and aging) CGI. They were arguably trying to play it safe and it gained them nothing.
In theory if your soldiers took a lot of hits in combat that would automatically make them a secret thing, but yeah all soldiers eventually had a preset event to make them “things”.
The rate of Thingification is not established, but we do see that the full-on-attack mode is quick. From casual contact it may take longer; think in terms of viral load. When a full-on Thing attacks and takes over a person, it’s pumping HUGE quantities of its own Thing-cells into its victim for rapid takeover.
If Blair got infected from touching the forceps to his lips, or getting a few drops of Thing-blood on his skin, it may have taken a while before he was Thinged, simply because there’s too few Thing-cells having to take over a much larger organism. He may have still been (probably was) fully Blair when he attacked Windows and destroyed the radios, before being subdued, tranquilized, and isolated. By my theory, he finished transformation into a full-on Thing during his isolation.
Of course they sorta half-did that in the first one with Clark the dog-handler. But of course MacReady shooting him in self-defense took any sting out of it.
The movie is the lead Wikipedia article tonight. [English version]
… which reminds me that every time I see the thread title, I want to post:
My movie question about The Thing is ‘So, Roger Corman really couldn’t make a better Thing costume?’
Sorry, asking this “idiotic tangent” question was becoming an obsession… now I’m over it (and I found a copy of this, as well as the horrible JLA “film”).
I didn’t know until last night that the entire crew behind the camera was also male. Kurt Russell mentioned that it was interesting because “there was no posing because there was no one around to pose for.”