Is The Thing digesting people and dogs for nutrition or just because it wants to imitate them? If it just wanted to imitate them, then why would it digest a dog if it was already a dog?
Must it digest someone in order to imitate him, or can the person get infected just by touching something that The Thing touched?
Am I right in thinking that there were multiple imitations of people at one time? Like: (1) the guy getting defibrillated, (2) the guy who said “You’ve got to be fucking kidding!” (because he was the very next infected guy to be revealed), and (2) Wilford Brimley who was meanwhile imprisoned in the shack? That would be three imitations going on simultaneously.
Mr. brown was watching, too, and it was the first time he saw it. I could tell he was freaked out, but he pretended like it was a lousy movie and no one would believe any of those monster models.
The Thing can replicate once it has a sample, IMO. It is unclear but IMO the Thing doesn’t need to consume a whole entity, just needs a small DNA sample. It kills and disposes of entities because it is covering it’s tracks and remaining camouflaged.
The Thing can and does split itself off, so yes, there are multiple Things at one time. Once it splits from itself, the split is definitive, hence memories and knowledge diverge (that’s why at the end, each is suspicious of the other).
Still one of my favorite SF and horror movies. I didn’t bother with the reboot a few years ago; the original movie is so close to perfect, I just didn’t need it.
It imitated by infecting and transforming cells of the host critter into Thing cells. So the “digesting” was the imitating in process.
It looks like it requires actual cellular contact, but presumably( utter fan-wank here )the more Thing cells in contact, the faster the transformation. Or perhaps a certain titer of cells is necessary to overcome host resistance, such that a couple of sloughed skin cells on a door knob just isn’t enough. The movie never does make it clear.
Yes and again there has been a lot of fan theorizing here. Are all imitations part of the same host mind at all times or does it imitate and hide so well that even the imitated host in the moment may not fully realize it is the Thing. In other words the Thing may use the host personality as perfect camouflage to the extent it only emerges to “take over” when it senses the time is right. It seems likely that’s the case, but again just a hypothesis.
There’s a part where one scientist is looking at a blood sample under a microscope, and he can see “Thing” cells infecting and transforming regular cells. So, presumably, you don’t get “eaten” by the thing, you get “infected” by it. Filling a syringe with Thing blood and injecting a human would turn the human into a Thing. The scenes where it looks like its digesting things, like the dogs in the cage, is them being mid-transformation between a terrestrial creature and a space monster.
There are absolutely different “Things” running around at the same time. There’s two explanations for how this happens, both of which we see onscreen. One is that the Thing attacks someone, bites them to inject them with Thing cells, and then leaves them to be taken over and transformed into another Thing. The other is that the Thing can separate itself, like an amoeba undergoing cell division except bigger and grosser.
It appears that intact skin is a barrier to infection, else, as Tamerlane points out, everyone on the base would be infected in short order, just by touching doorknobs. It also apparently doesn’t spread very well as an aerosol, either, for largely the same reasoning.
I always figured that there needed to be some minimum amount of “thing” cells in order to “take over”, otherwise the body would fight it off like any infection. If that weren’t the case, the Thing’s smartest move would be to slough off portions of itself into aerosol and just infect everyone.
John W. Campbell was rather vague about it in his original story Who Goes There? (which the 1982 version closely adheres to, up until the end. Like many of the stories Campbell oversaw, it’s a scientific puzzle with a scientific solution, and an upbeat ending. The movie did away with the “upbeat” part, leaving an ambiguous ending. I didn’t much care for the recent “prequel”, which I thought ruined the first movie, rather than adding to it.
They weren’t getting infected from doorknobs or the air, but they had evidence (based on the dogs that got infected by swallowing pieces of the infected dog during the fight) or at least suspected that it wouldn’t take very much, hence the precautions for each one to prepare his own food out of sealed cans.
FWIW, it wasn’t a reboot; it was a prequel, detailing what went on at the Norwegian camp prior to the events at Outpost 31. The prequel ends with the last two survivors of the Norwegian camp flying the helicopter after the running/escaping dog that opens into the events of the 1982 movie.