Eye Candy #571 - "The Thing" (2011)

The Thing (2011): “That’s not a dog!”  A prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film of the same name which I dearly love (which in turn was a remake of the 1951 film “The Thing From Another World”), this film details the 3 days prior to the events featured in the 1982 film, as an alien space ship is discovered beneath the ice in Antarctica.  Its alien passenger, frozen in the ice for 100,000 years, is taken back to base camp by a team of Norwegian scientists (with a healthy smattering of American staff to make American audiences give a crap), where it promptly thaws out and attempts to absorb and assimilate anyone it comes in contact with, all while sprouting fangs, tentacles, and vaguely phallic appendages galore.  Dr. Kate Lloyd (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a paleontologist hired by the head Norwegian researcher to help extract the alien from ice, but she’s also the first to realize what the alien is trying to do.  From then on, it’s all guns, flamethrowers, thermite grenades, and people who aren’t what they appear to be, as Lloyd realizes they have to stop the monster from leaving the Norwegian camp.  Joel Edgerton, channeling Kurt Russell’s Macready from the 1982 film, is an American helicopter pilot caught up in the alien to-do.  The supporting cast also includes Eric Christian Olsen (in a rare serious role) and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko from “Lost), amidst a host of Danish and Norwegian actors.  Violent, gory, and paranoiac, the film seesaws between monster attacks and the mounting distrust between the remaining humans as the alien hides among them.  Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., in his first full-length English language picture, has an almost slavish devotion to the production design of the 1982 film, making sure to incorporate salient bits to set up the next part of the story, from where bodies are left and what condition they are found in to the size and shape of the block of ice the alien was trapped in.  For fans of the original, these are nice touches without it being a straight homage.  Because let’s face it – we know how this ends before we ever sit down in the theater.  At times it does feel like it’s retracing some of the same steps as the first picture, but there are enough swerves to keep it going along.  Woodchuck sez, “Me likey.”