It’s a classic lowbrow guilty pleasure :D. I suspect the affection for it is more along the lines of a cult following rather than a critical one. It’s sort of like the film The Hidden in that respect.
I really appreciate its quieter moments with their sense of foreboding and I think the opening is gorgeous. IMO Carpenter can be quite good at building unease and dramatic tension - the first thirty minutes of Prince of Darkness is similarly effective. But then he explodes it all in a tower of gore. His excess really is often EXCESS.
That seems likely, if for no other reason than there’s not much material the original movie left unexplored. It does appear that this new one is going to spend more time in the crashed space ship, which is the only thing I can think of that would really provide something new, but I always kind of liked that the original left the ship just a shadow in the ice.
I don’t really expect much from this film other than some neat looking monsters and appropriately gory deaths. If it can deliver on that, I’ll be content.
I would like it if the film establishes a romantic relationship between the female lead, a bearded Norwegian, and his trusty dog, and ends on an upbeat note where they all survive and have a helicopter to get back to safety. Just because of the way that recontextures the opening of the original.
Though I’ve seen Carpenter’s The Thing, I somehow missed the first few minutes of the movie. They really killed a Norwegian guy because he was going to kill a dog?
For my money, they could spend the first hour unraveling the mystery of what happened on board that ship and that would be OK with me. Presumably the crew of the ship was being attacked when it crashed.
With the irony being that Palmer was a Thing himself at the time. So was he just playing the part, or did he not consciously realize what he truly was?
Critically, it’s 80% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, though I think I recall hearing that it didn’t fare so well critically at first, but has grown on critics over time.
I loved the special effects of the 80s’ movies. You had to have some actual chops to pull off good special effects, but if you succeeded, the results were fantastic. The Thing was a success in my eyes. The transformations were…unsettling.
My dad woke me up really late one night when I was maybe six to watch “this really great part” of The Thing. It was the blood test scene. The tension nearly killed me.
I’m not going to pre-judge this one. I’m a huge fan of both the '51 version and the '82, as well as the short story which I first read in junior high in '80. All very different, story-wise, but each excellent.
I can think of a few scenarios for a prequel that don’t automatically suck.
Also, and I may be mis-remembering this, but wasn’t the outpost unable to contact anyone via radio?
All in all, I’ve pay to see this one in the theater.
Even before it was destroyed, Windows was unable to raise anybody on the radio. One of the best features of the original trailer is that it begins with the lonesome, static-y voice of Windows calling out for help over the airwaves…and ends with static-y dead air.
