The Thing 2011 - REVIEW

Hollywood has no shortage of remakes and reboots these days. Every time we turn around there's another one in our faces and let's be honest, most of them are not pleasant to sit through. Perhaps it's a fair to say that the powers that be in Hollywood took note of the outrage of most movie goers and decided to re-introduced prequels. Prequels have definitely gained significantly in popularity in the 2000's with more than fifty being made in just the last 12 years as opposed to the sixteen or so done between the 1948 - 1999. For those of you who don't know what a prequel is (I'm hoping that's no one)... it's a remake, but not.

Paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet. Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.

The performances are about what you'd expect from a film with a 35 million dollar budget. I personally haven't seen a performance from Winstead that I didn't like... so far... I don't think... ok, not that I remember anyway. She has a great range and is really good at expressing emotion in her face making her performances believable. Eric Christian Olsen is another one that I like a lot. This is a more serious role than I'm use to seeing him in so it's nice to see that he can be more than just the resident goofball. Other than Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who's skills I think are terribly under estimated, the rest of the cast is basically unknown to me. Of course during reviews I always check out the IMDb pages which usually brings up an "Oh yeah!" moment or two. I was disappointed in how under used Edgerton was. Having not really read any synopsis or reviews for this film, I was almost certain that Olsen would've been "the man". Guess that's what I get for making assumptions, I'll try not to do that anymore... yeah right!

Overall, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer did an awesome job weaving this story together and making it intersect with John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing fairly flawlessly. I know this because as soon as 2011's prequel was over, we watched the one from 1982. Although I had seen it a million times, the similarities between the two were pretty dead on. From the room where they stored the alien when it was encased in ice to the dog chase ending. One literally leaves off where the other begins. I did find myself questioning a few things when it was all said and done but nothing that ruined it for me. This prequel was one of the rare good ones and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of John Carpenter's The Thing.