The Thing about The Thing...

In The Thing, the Thing attempts to absorb and imitate its victims, then kill everyone else in the same way. This also works as an analogy for The Thing. The Thing attempts to imitate The Thing and then kill its audience (well, kill their IQ), much like the Thing in both The Thing and The Thing.

By watching The Thing, we can learn how to defeat the terribleness of The Thing by finding out how the people in The Thing defeat the terribleness of the Thing. Firstly, if we keep our eyes open for subtle differences between the Thing and its counterpart, we can tell which is the original and which is the imitator. In both The Thing and The Thing, the Thing is unable to absorb and imitate inorganic material, meaning Thing versions of people can be spotted if they’re missing earrings or fillings etc. In The Thing, the Thing is created using wonderfully-repulsive, inorganic latex creature effects (courtesy of Rob Bottin), while in The Thing, the inorganic effects materials are not replicated, and the Thing is instead presented with intangible computer-generated effects (which, in fairness, are still wonderfully-repulsive). Thereby, The Thing is revealed as the Thing counterpart of The Thing.

The second thing we can learn from watching The Thing is that if we attack the Thing, it will reveal itself as a Thing and can therefore be destroyed. This also applies to The Thing. To attack The Thing, we can pull it apart via its dumb, clichéd script, its generic, uninspired cinematography, its simple, typical characters, its predictable over-reliance on jump scares, and so on. Eric Heisserer has written a blues standard of a horror screenplay, but absorbed some of The Thing to create his own rendition. There’s the usual cast of dumb characters, even more surprising since they’re supposed to be a bunch of scientists and yet they could probably be declared brain-dead in the real world. There’s the usual ‘expose and explain everything we can because our audience is as dumb as our characters’ attitude to the dialogue. And there’s the usual ‘very quiet, very tense, guy on his own, something’s gonna hap-“BLAH! LOL IT’S ONLY ME DIDN’T MEAN TO SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU DUDE HAHAHA.”’ cheap jumpy moments. None of which were present in The Thing.

The Thing seems to try to imitate not only The Thing, but also, nearly every American ‘horror’ film of the last 10 years, becoming one big amalgam Thing of The Thing and about a zillion other films. And so, comparing these aspects of The Thing to the same aspects in The Thing reveals The Thing as the Thing.

The bit that fans of The Thing are probably waiting for finally occurs after an hour and a half of bland, mostly-forgettable predictable horror fare, albeit dragged out by the interspersed credits. The Thing ends with the Thing escaping the Norwegian base, heading towards the American base in dog form, chased by two Norwegians in a helicopter, leading immediately into the beginning of The Thing wherein the Thing goes on to wreak further disgusting havoc. I was pretty much waiting the whole time for that tie-in, and it did make me smile, like some kind of in-joke that not a lot of other people got.

The other redeeming thing about seeing The Thing at the cinema was the tension between my friends and I afterwards as we all realised we couldn’t trust each other anymore.

As a reflection of The Thing, this review of The Thing has been an exercise in redundancy. You see, I was trying to be like The Thing and imitate The Thing. Or was I trying to be like the Thing and imitate the Thing? Maybe I was the Thing imitating The Thing. Wait, now I’m confused...