The Thing (2011)

The Thing is a 2011 mystery sci-fi horror film released by Universal. It is a prequel to the 1982 film of the same name. The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Eric Christian Olsen, and is directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr..

Plot
In 1982, paleontologist Kate Lloyd is recruited by scientists Dr. Sander Halvorson and his assistant Adam Finch to join a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship buried beneath the ice of Antarctica. They discover the frozen corpse of a creature that seems to have briefly survived the crash 100,000 years ago.

After the creature is transported back to base in a block of ice, Dr. Sander orders them to retrieve a tissue sample, against Kate's protests. Later, while the others celebrate, co-pilot Derek sees the creature escape from the block of ice. The team splits up into groups to search for the alien. Olav and Henrik discover it hiding under one of the buildings. The Thing grabs Henrik and pulls him into its body. The others converge on the scene and set the creature on fire. In the chaotic aftermath, the lone dog of the team is found dead in a bloody heap in its kennel, a massive hole torn in the wire mesh.

During an autopsy, Kate and Adam discover that the cells of the Thing appear to be absorbing and imitating Henrik's cells. Meanwhile, Derek, pilot Sam Carter, Griggs and Olav prepare to leave the base in the only helicopter to bring back help. Just as they prepare to take off, Kate discovers bloody, discarded metal tooth fillings and large amounts of blood in the showers. She runs outside to flag down the departing helicopter, fearing the Thing may have imitated someone on board. When Carter decides to land, Griggs reveals himself as The Thing attacks Olav, causing the helicopter to spin wildly out of control and crash in the mountains, presumably killing all on board.

In the rec room, Kate tells the other scientists her theory on the nature of the creature: It is perfectly capable of imitating any life form and that it may have done so with members of their camp, but cannot imitate inorganic material much as metal, hence why it spit out the tooth fillings. Most of the team members either do not believe her or accuse her to turning them against each other out of paranoia. After everyone else leaves, Juliette tells Kate that she believes her and that she saw Colin leave the shower holding a towel. Juliette tells Kate that she knows where they keep the vehicle keys, and that they can take them to prevent anyone else from leaving; however, when the two go to retrieve them, Juliette transforms and attempts to kill Kate. As Kate flees, she runs past Karl, who is too slow to act and is killed by the Juliette-Thing. Lars arrives with a flamethrower and burns the Thing as it assimilates Karl. As they burn the remains outside, Carter and Derek, now revealed to be alive, but half-frozen, start stumbling into the base. While some of the team believes they are Things and should be burned, Kate convinces them to simply lock them up until a test can be prepared. Adam and Sander are in the lab preparing a potential test, but when both leave for a short while, the lab is engulfed in flames in an apparent sabotage. Tensions rise as accusations by both the Norwegians and the Americans are made, but Kate proposes another, much simpler test to single out those who might be the Thing from those who aren't. She uses a flashlight to inspect the teeth of all the other team members to see who has fillings and who doesn't. This test singles out Adam, Dr. Sander, station commander Edvard, and Colin. Peder sends Lars and Jonas out to bring back Carter and Derek, but they have tunneled out of the floor of the storage shed and into a neighboring building. When Lars leans in the doorway of the other building, he is suddenly pulled inside. Jonas runs back pleads with Peder to help him rescue Lars, but Kate orders him to guard the potential Things.

During the argument, Carter and Derek force their way inside, armed with Lars' flamethrower. Edvard pushes Peder to burn both of them, assuming that they have killed Lars. When Peder takes aim, Derek shoots him dead in self-defense with Lars' gun, but also punctures his fuel tank, causing an explosion that knocks Edvard unconscious. While Edvard is being carried back to the rec room, he awakens and transforms into the Thing. He infects Jonas, kills Derek, and assimilates Adam while Sander and Colin flee. After torching Jonas and Derek, Carter and Kate head off to hunt it down. The Thing, which is now in the form of a creature with the faces of both Edvard and Adam, ambushes and attacks Dr. Sander. The monster manages to separate Carter from Kate and traps him in the kitchen. Just as it is about to kill him, Kate arrives and torches the monster.

Kate and Carter see Sander, who was infected by the creature, driving off in one of the Snowcats and give chase in the remaining vehicle. They follow it out to the wreck of its ship, which has been opened up and restarted, slowly preparing to take off. Kate and Carter are separated once again and Kate encounters The Sander-Thing. She barely manages to stay out of its reach, and when it finally catches her, she destroys it with a grenade, as destroying the interior of the ship. She and Carter escape and make it back to the Snowcat. As they are prepare to leave, Kate notices that Carter is missing his left ear piercing and determines that he is one of those Things. Carter points to his wrong ear. Kate then burns him, during which he screams like an alien, proving Kate's determination correct. Kate slowly climbs into the remaining Snowcat and stares blankly into the night.

The next morning, a Norwegian helicopter pilot, Matias, arrives at the Norwegian camp and finds the facility burned and deserted, as well as the charred remains of the two-faced Adam/Edvard-Thing. He shouts, looking for any survivors. It is revealed that Colin went into the radio room and committed suicide by slitting his wrists and throat to ensure The Thing could never get to him. Lars, now revealed to have survived uninfected hiding in the building where Derek and Carter attacked him, shoots at Matias but recognizes that he is human after ordering him at gunpoint to show him his tooth fillings to prove it. At that moment, The Thing in the form of Lars' deceased dog bolts out of a ruined building and runs away. Lars realizes that it's The Thing and fires at it, then orders Matias to take off in pursuit. While Matias pilots the helicopter, Lars begins shooting at the animal from the helicopter, beginning the events of the 1982 film.

Cast

 * Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Kate Lloyd, an American vertebrate paleontologist graduate from Columbia University: In order to be different from Kurt Russell as the 1982 film's protagonist, R.J. MacReady, Kate Lloyd was written to have similar traits as the character Ellen Ripley from the Alien film series.
 * Joel Edgerton as Samuel "Sam" Carter: An American helicopter pilot and Vietnam War veteran running a supply operation to the bases. He and his two co-pilots are left in the dark as to why they are there and what is the mysterious thing the scientists have found.
 * Ulrich Thomsen as Dr. Sander Halvorson, the arrogant Danish leader of alien research. He orders the team to obtain a sample of the recently discovered creature despite Kate's warnings.
 * Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Derek Jameson, an American helicopter co-pilot and also a Vietnam veteran who is Carter's best friend.
 * Eric Christian Olsen as Adamowicz "Adam" Finch, a young American scientist working as Dr. Sander's research assistant who invites Kate to the Norwegian base.
 * Trond Espen Seim as Edvard Wolner, a notable Norwegian geologist who is the station commander and an old friend of Sander.
 * Kim Bubbs as Juliette, a geologist from Georgia who is part of Edvard's team.
 * Jørgen Langhelle as Lars, an ex-soldier who works as the dog keeper of the Norwegian base, also the only member of the Norwegian base who does not speak English.
 * Kristofer Hivju as Jonas, a nervous but friendly Norwegian polar ice researcher.
 * Stig Henrik Hoff as Peder, a Norwegian rifle-toting camp member who is Edvard's right hand man.
 * Paul Braunstein as Griggs, a crew-chief member of the American helicopter transport team.
 * Jonathan Lloyd Walker as Colin, an eccentric English radio operator.
 * Jo Adrian Haavind as Henrik, another Norwegian base member who assists the alien research team.
 * Jan Gunnar Røise as Olav, a Norwegian Snowcat vehicle driver and guide.
 * Carsten Bjørnlund as Karl, a Norwegian geologist also part of Edvard's team.
 * Ole Martin Aune Nilsen as Matias, the helicopter pilot of the Norwegian base currently in a mission to restock kerosene at McMurdo Station.

Development
After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they felt that remaking Carpenter's film would be like "paint(ing) a moustache on the Mona Lisa". Eric Newman explained; "I'd be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone remake The Exorcist... And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It's a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It's the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter's movie - they're already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible." In early 2009, Variety reported the launch of a project to film a prequel—possibly following MacReady's brother during the events leading up to the opening moments of the 1982 film—with Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. as director and Ronald D. Moore as writer. Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. became involved in the project when his first planned feature film, a sequel to the Dawn of the Dead remake, a zombie film taking place in Las Vegas written and produced by Zack Snyder, who directed the Dawn of the Dead remake, and co-produced by Abraham and Newman, called Army of the Dead, was cancelled by the studio three months before production began. Needing to start all over again, he asked his agent to see if there was a The Thing project in development, since Alien and The Thing are his favorite films. As a fan of Carpenter's film, he was interested in the project because, being European himself, he had always wondered what happened at the Norwegian camp. In March 2009, Moore described his script as a "companion piece" to Carpenter's film and "not a remake." "We're telling the story of the Norwegian camp that found the Thing before the Kurt Russell group did", he said. Eric Heisserer was later hired to do a complete rewrite of Moore's script. Heisserer explained that in writing the script, it was necessary for him to research all the information that was revealed about the Norwegian camp from the first film, down to the smallest details, so that it could be incorporated into the prequel in order to create a consistent backstory. The decision was made to name the film the same title as the first film, because the producers felt adding a "colon title" such as Exorcist II: The Heretic had felt less reverential.

Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. explained that he created the film not to simply be a horror film, but to also focus largely on the human drama with the interaction between characters, as the first film had. The director felt that horror films worked better when time was spent to explore the characters' emotional journeys, allowing the audience to care about them. Mary Elizabeth Winstead insisted that the film would not feature any romantic or sexual elements with her character, as it would be inappropriate considering the tone of the film. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje said that the film would try to recreate the feeling of paranoia and distrust that the first film had, where the characters can't tell who has been infected by the alien. The filmmakers drew additional inspiration for the film from the original novel Who Goes There?, in making the characters in the film educated scientists as opposed to "blue collar" workers. However, the filmmakers drew no influence from the events of the The Thing video game. The director also drew additional inspiration from the film Alien in creating the film, particularly in regard to casting a female lead, and in the way the alien creatures are filmed by not showing too much of them. Matthijs van Heijningen also cited the films of director Roman Polanski as influence, such as his work on Rosemary's Baby. Actual Norwegian and Danish actors were cast in the film to play the Norwegian characters, and the director allowed the actors to improvise elements different from what was scripted when they felt it was appropriate, such as a scene where the characters sing a Norwegian folk song called Sámiid Ædnan ("Lapland"). Many scenes involving characters speaking Norwegian were subtitled, and the language barrier between them and the English speaking characters is exploited to add to the film's feeling of paranoia. Director Matthijs van Heijningen said that the film would show the alien creature in its "pure form", as it was discovered in its ship by the Norwegians; however, it is not revealed whether this is the creature's original form or the form of another creature it had assimilated. Addressing rumors stating that John Carpenter wished to have a cameo appearance in the film, Carpenter himself corrected these in an interview for the fan site "Outpost 31", in August 2012. "[Those] rumors are not true", Carpenter stated in the interview.

Filming and post-production
The film was shot in the anamorphic format on 35 mm film, as the director dislikes the look of films shot digitally. The director chose not to fast cut the film, instead opting for a slower pace, hoping to build a sense of pending dread. The prequel was filmed in Pinewood Toronto Studios, Port Lands on March 22, 2010 and ended on June 28, 2010. On set, the director had a laptop computer which contained "a million" screen captures of the Carpenter film, which he used as a point of reference to keep the Norwegian camp visually consistent with the first film. Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. of Amalgamated Dynamics created the practical creature effects for the film. In addition to creating the effects for the human-Thing transformations, Gillis, Woodruff and their team had the challenge of coming up with the look of the alien in the ice block unearthed by the Norwegians. While it was initially only intended to be shown as a silhouette, the director liked their designs and encouraged them to fully create the creature, which was realised by creating a monster suit that Tom Woodruff wore. The effects team opted to use cable-operated animatronics over more complex hydraulic controls, as they felt they gave a more "organic feel". In order to emulate the creature effects of the first film, Heisserer revealed that traditional practical effects would be used on the creatures whenever possible. The film's computer-generated imagery was created by Image Engine, the effects house who worked on Neil Blomkamp's 2009 film District 9. Computer Graphics were used to digitally create extensions on some of the practical animatronic effects, as well as for digital matte paintings and set extensions. Alec Gillis stated that the advancement of animatronic technology since 1982 combined with digital effects allowed the effects team to expand upon the possible creature conceptions. Matthijs van Heijningen preferred to use practical effects over computer imagery, as he believed actors give better performances when they have something physical to react to. However in post release interviews, Alec Gillis revealed that while Amalgamated Dynamics creature designs for the film remained intact, most of their practical effects ended up being digitally replaced in post production. The creation of Gillis' all practical effects independent horror film Harbinger Down was partially in response to this. Stunt men covered in fire-retardant gel were used in scenes when characters are set on fire. The original Ennio Morricone score was reflected in the film's score, but it was initially reported that Morricone did not score the film, nor was his music from the 1982 version used. However, his theme "Humanity (Part II)" appears in a bonus scene during the prequel's ending credits (indicating how it leads directly into the 1982 film).

The interior of the crashed alien spacecraft was created by production designer Sean Haworth. To design the ship, Haworth had to recreate what little was shown of the spacecraft in the Carpenter film, then "fill the gaps" for what was not originally shown. Haworth and a team of approximately twelve others then created the inside of the ship as a several story-high interior set constructed mostly out of a combination of foam, plaster, fiberglass, and plywood. The ship was designed specifically to look as if it were not made to accommodate humans, but rather alien creatures of different size and shape who could walk on any surface. A section of the craft called the "pod room" was designed to imply the alien creatures manning it had collected specimens of different alien species from around the universe for a zoological expedition.

While the film was originally set for release in April, Universal Pictures changed the date to October 14, 2011, to allow time for reshoots. The intention of the reshoots was to "enhance existing sequences or to make crystal clear a few story beats or to add punctuation marks to the film's feeling of dread." On his Facebook page, Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. claimed that the reshoots of the film included making an entirely different ending, referring to the original cut as the "Pilot Version" and the new cut as the "Tetris Version". In the original ending, Kate was to discover the original pilots of the spaceship which had all been killed by The Thing, which was an escaped specimen they had collected from another planet, implying that the ship was crashed in an attempt to kill the monster. "I liked that idea because it would be the Norwegian camp in space. Kate sees the pod room and one pod being broken, giving her the clues what happened. What didn't work was that she wanted to find Sander and stop the ship from taking off and still solve the mystery in the ship. These two energies were in conflict."

Box office
The Thing grossed $8,493,665 over the opening weekend and ended up third on the box office chart. It was distributed to 2,996 theaters and spent a total of one week on the top 10 chart, before dropping down to the 16th position in its second week. It concluded its domestic run with a total of $16,928,670. Its box office collections was called "an outright disappointment" by Box Office Mojo, who goes on to say "[the film] was naturally at a disadvantage: a vague "thing" doesn't give prospective audiences much to latch on to. It was therefore left up to fans of the original, who are already familiar with the concept, to turn out in strong numbers." The film grossed $9,530,415 in foreign countries, bringing the total worldwide box office gross so far to $27,428,670.

Critical reception
The Thing received mixed reviews. It currently holds a 36% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 149 critic reviews, with an average rating of 5.1 out of 10, with the site's consensus: "It serves the bare serviceable minimum for a horror flick, but The Thing is all boo-scares and a slave to the far superior John Carpenter version." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 49 based on 31 reviews. In CinemaScore polls users gave the film a "B-" on an A+ to F scale. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film a rating of 3 out of 4, saying "While I wish van Heijningen's Thing weren't quite so in lust with the '82 model, it works because it respects that basic premise; and it exhibits a little patience, doling out its ickiest, nastiest moments in ways that make them stick". Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com called it a "Loving prequel to a horror classic", saying "It's full of chills and thrills and isolated Antarctic atmosphere and terrific Hieronymus Bosch creature effects, and if it winks genially at the plot twists of Carpenter's film, it never feels even a little like some kind of inside joke." James Berardinelli gave it three stars out of four, saying that it "offers a similar overall experience" to the 1982 film, but "without replicating styles and situations". Christopher Orr of The Atlantic wrote that the narrative choices open to a prequel "exist on a spectrum from the unsurprising to the unfaithful", but van Heijningen "has managed this balancing act about as well as could be hoped" and although the line between homage and apery is a fine one, "in our age of steady knockoffs, retreads, and loosely branded money grabs, The Thing stands out as a competent entertainment, capably executed if not particularly inspired."

Other critics singled out Mary Elizabeth Winstead for praise in her performance as the lead, Dr. Kate Lloyd. "[Winstead] stands out with her portrayal of a paleontologist. She keeps a cool, logical head whilst others around her start to panic. It's a refreshing change from your traditional horror film where the lead characters do moronic things as if to prolong the story", Matthew Toomey of The Film Pie wrote. Josh Bell of Las Vegas Weekly rated the film three out of five stars and wrote, "Winstead makes for an appealing protagonist, and Kate is portrayed as competent without being thrust into some unlikely action-hero role."

Kathleen Murphy of MSN Movies rated it two-and-a-half out of five stars, calling it "a subpar slasher movie tricked out with tired 'Ten Little Indians' tropes and rip-offs from both Carpenter and the Christian Nyby-Howard Hawks' 1951 version of the chilling tale that started it all, John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Who Goes There?". Jim Vejvoda of IGN Movies also rated the film two-and-a-half out of five, saying, "This incarnation of The Thing is much like the creature it depicts: An insidious, defective mimic of the real, er, thing. It's not an entirely lost cause, but it is a needless one." Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of four, the same rating he gave the 1982 film. In Patrick Sauriol of Coming Attractions' review, he states, "Stack it up against John Carpenter's version and it looks less shiny, but let's face it, if you’re that kind of Thing fan you’re going to go see the new movie anyway. Try and judge today's Thing on its own merits."

Accolades
The film was nominated for two awards at the 38th Saturn Awards, but lost to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and X-Men: First Class, respectively.