The Thing

Set in 1982 as a prequel to director John Carpenter's 1982 movie, The Thing (which was a remake of the 1951 movie, The Thing From Another World, which means we can expect a 2041 remake of The Thing, which will be a comeback vehicle for Suri Cruise and Willow "Whip My Hair" Smith), Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Kate - a graduate student who is very good at examining fossils found in ice, so she is the perfect candidate to join an oddly domineering scientist, Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), who is heading to Antarctica for a massive project.

So far down by the South Pole you don't even see a penguin frolicking in the snow, a strange out of this world spaceship has been found, and one of the aliens has been discovered frozen near the ice's surface. Of course, these guys cut out a block of the ice with the alien inside, and defrost it (not one of the smartest ideas in the history of movies or mankind).

When the alien gets loose and has a special power that causes all of the expedition crew to distrust each other, who will live and who will die?

Will the alien escape the camp?

The Thing is a gory, gross out movie without much else going for it. Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer want to make the movie into some sort of psychological thriller about deception, isolation, paranoia and more, but all of that takes a back seat to trying to set the alien on fire with a flamethrower and watching it kill people (with a vengeance!).

This leads to plenty of campy moments and dialogue, but Heijningen delivers some nice, tense scary moments as well. When motivated to do so, he knows how to get our skin crawling and our hands over our eyes to hide from the anticipated fright that seems to be ready to occur.

Sadly, he and Heisserer mostly treat the characters like pieces of meat. They are mere pawns to be pushed around the Antarctic base camp until the big bad alien does his deeds in the bloodiest, nastiest way possible. We aren't supposed to care about their deaths. We are supposed to marvel at the carnage.

I guess that tells you what you need to know about The Thing. If you like carnage, have fun.

The Thing is rated R for strong creature violence and gore, disturbing images, and language.