It’s the first week of winter and the men (Keith David, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, and others) of the National Science Institute’s Research Station 4 in Antarctica are about to have their uneventful existences rocked. What they think is an act of rescue turns out to be a foredoomed gesture. At the beginning of The Thing (1982), John Carpenter’s adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella, a couple Norwegians frantically shoot at a running-for-its-life husky from the safety of a helicopter until they wind up at Station 4. This chase has the kind of absurdity that makes you instinctually nervous. Shouting frantically in their native tongue, the Norwegians try communicating with these bewildered Americans probably about the danger this dog poses. But they only seem nonsensically hysterical, especially once they whip out guns and start shooting haphazardly.
When forced to choose between the men screaming and flinging bullets and the pup offering face licks, 4’s men go with the latter and successfully defend themselves. But by the time someone on the crew can at last note aloud that it was awfully strange for those late Scandinavians to be flying that low, and that determined to kill a seemingly innocent dog, the death sentence has already begun, made official when the taken-in pet is locked in with the crew’s handful of other dogs and red tentacles and a Venus Fly Trap-like mouth start to erupt from its body.
This obviously is no dog. It’s actually, the crew will learn after some investigating of some nearby destruction (and, of course, mountingly horrifying personal experience), a shape-shifting alien that has presumably emerged from a spaceship that crash-landed in the area eons ago. Its motivations, I guess, are to take over all life forms on Earth, a planet that probably can be tallied as one of endless selected for conquering.
As this creature’s presence widens on the base, the men’s reckless paranoia multiplies tenfold. Some are at points locked out in the cold, cries for help heard as potential alien trickery not to be fallen for. In the film’s most anxious set piece, pilot and de facto leader MacReady (a hirsute Kurt Russell) forces everyone still left to give him a blood sample so that he can light it aflame and see what happens. (Thus far, this animal has proved impervious to things like bullets but seems even more destabilized by the element than those made up of genuine flesh and blood.) The Thing is a nightmarish, dripping-with-dread horror movie when taken literally. But it also functions dynamically as an indictment of reactionary violence and the way, like fire fighting with fire, it can be depended on either to compound or surpass entirely what had originally caused it. The ambiguous ending works ingeniously. You still can’t fully trust that the men remaining are still the men we’d come to know or just convincing duplicates.
Despite the relative gauziness of its characters, The Thing is among Carpenter’s best movies in an all-killer-no-filler decade. And despite an emphasis on goopy creature effects (which remain some of the finest ever committed to the screen) that in another project of his might have been more mined for grossout comedy, it’s among his most serious and committedly moonless. The situation’s strangling, simple terror rivals the dark, suburban havoc of Carpenter’s most conceptually economic horror movie, Halloween (1978).
But par for the course for a director whose masterpieces have often been widely recognized as such not upon release but decades later (hindsight should be paid overtime for its hard work), The Thing wasn’t received merely negatively but truly disdainfully in 1982. Even the director of the 1951 adaptation of Campbell’s book, Christian Nyby, couldn’t resist a chance to badmouth. Most unimpressed reviews, as was a common trend at the time, were liable to immediately writing off the seriousness of a film which also happened to include, and relish in, top-notch special effects. Now they feel less like a distraction than a necessity á la Alien (1979) to cement the movie’s scariness and magnify whichever allegorical ideas you’re inclined to apply for your latest viewing. (The movie is hospitable to many.) The Thing’s initial failure had immediately negative effects on Carpenter’s then-ascendent career. That it would eventually be reappraised would make for a satisfying last laugh if the bruise’s hurt still didn’t linger.
Peterson Reviews 