D: Matthijs van  Heijningen Jr. S: Eric Heisserer. Story: “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr. P: Marc Abraham, Eric Newman. Cast: Mary Elisabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Eric Christian Olsen. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Universal.

As Tuco Ramirez will tell you, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who feel John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) to be one of the ten greatest films in the history of the form…and those who think it’s (duh) Just Another Monster Movie. (Since the latter group’s views are manifestly absurd, we need speak no more of them.) Widely considered by right-thinking geeks to be one of the best genre remakes around – sharing the top spot with Philip Kaufman’s fine urban-alienation nightmare Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – JC’s The Thing has actually little in common with the Howard Hawks classic, being a more-or-less faithful adaptation of the John W. Campbell, Jr novella (“Who Goes There?”) which nominally inspired the 1951 film. First published in 1938, the tale bears a fleeting resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (written 1931, but not published until 1936), part of HPL’s famed Cthulhu Mythos; both deal with centuries-old, shape-shifting alien horrors in the Antarctic, but while Lovecraft’s is an almost plotless mood piece, Campbell’s boasts a smart SF conceit (ignored by the makers of Thing ’51, but warmly embraced by Carpenter & Co) – that of an alien xenomorph capable of absorbing, then replicating, any living creature it meets. The ultimate identity theft.

It’s a fine idea, though sadly Campbell’s prose fails to do it justice. (Reviewing “The Best of John W. Campbell, Jr”, Martin Amis once caustically observed, “If this is his best, what must his worst be like?”) Cometh the hour, cometh the man; and forty-odd years later, the right men appeareth at last. Using Campbell’s flat and talky narrative as a launching pad, Carpenter (and writer Bill Lancaster, Fils-de-Burt) transform the novella into a neo-Buddhist parable on the illusion of identity. If we can all be turned into exact replicas of ourselves, down to our memories, mannerisms and dodgy tickers, then perhaps we’re not so very unique after all? The Thing really hits us where we live, challenging our most deeply-held convictions about who we think we are: all those unique and unreproducible qualities which comprise our sense of self, of individuality. Dissolved and reconstituted by The Thing, living matter becomes a single, unified sea of being – dog, human, offworld beast, all conjoined and protoplasmically equal… (The thought of his obsessions, his hangups and [most of all] his prejudices being subsumed and given parity with everyone else’s, quite makes this reviewer’s blood run cold.)

So The Thing ’82 is an unqualified masterpiece; we hold this truth to be self-evident. Much of its pleasure stems from the incomplete hints that we, the viewer, receive of the events which transpired before the film begins. All we see of the Norwegian camp, wiped out in a prior altercation with the quarrelsome Thing, is a succession of inexplicable, grisly, nightmarish tableaux. Our minds queasily, uneasily absorb the images, as Morricone’s strings stoke our foreboding. We can only guess what happened here – and that, of course, is why the sequence works so well. For dread to gain a foothold, there must be an element of the unknown, a hint of the unknowable – for once doubt becomes certainty, the imagination powers down, the light dims, the story weakens its hold. The last thing we need, therefore, is some joker coming along explaining everything, flicking all our switches to the OFF position.

Enter The Thing 2011, threatening to do just that. Is it a prequel? A reimagining? A remake? In keeping with its source, it’s a composite being, a premaginake: what’s more, perhaps the best premaginake you’ll ever see. Contrary to all informed expectation, Thing ’11 is not at all terrible. Superfluous, didactic, an unironic act of imitation, yes – but emphatically not terrible, despite obvious opportunities for failure. It’s hobbled from  the get-go by the need to explain all that was, in ’82, left delightfully unexplained – but for all that, Dutch director Matthijs van  Heijningen Jr. and screenwriter Eric Heisserer do a pretty respectable job of reverse-engineering, even managing to throw in a couple of not-bad ideas of their own to relieve the monotony. It helps that the makers of the prequel are such obvious fans of the JC original, and predisposed to respect the material; sure, there are a couple  of errors of judgement, a general paucity of character, and at least one major discontinuity with Thing ’82 (we’ll get to that), but it could have been much, much worse.

Antarctica, 1982. Norwegian explorers locate a crashed alien spacecraft and its hundred-thousand-year-old pilot under the ice, digging up the latter and conveying it (ill-advisedly) to their camp. Head of the Norwegian research team, Dr Sander Halvorsen (Ulrich Thomsen, essentially reprising the Robert Cornthwaite role from Thing ’51) decides he needs extra expertise on hand to study the alien specimen, and has an outsider flown in: cute American palaeobiologiste Kate Lloyd (Mary Elisabeth Winstead). Trouble is, Kate and Halvorsen don’t see eye to eye on the best approach: he’s all in favour of drilling a hole in the Thing to obtain a tissue sample, while she feels that would be a mistake. Guess who’s right. Yep, pretty soon the Thing has erupted from its icy imprisonment and is on the rampage, infecting all and sundry with its yuckily mimetic alien biology.

So far, so predictable. But where Thing ‘11 works best is in its occasional inversion of expectations – firstly, in its evocation of the famous blood-testing sequence, and secondly in its effectively disgusting Thing transformations. As in Thing ’82, the camp’s supply of blood plasma gets trashed before scientists can devise an effective test for Thing-ness – but clever Kate quickly intuits another method of checking who’s human and who’s not. The Thing can only absorb and copy organic material – so if you have metal fillings in your teeth, it has to spit them out. Therefore, all you have to do to spot a Thing is take a look at everyone’s gnashers…chances are, if they’ve got no fillings, they’re not to be trusted. (A weaker variant of the blood test idea, granted, but at least it shows they’re trying to rethink the familiar from a different angle.)

So far as the effects are concerned, there’s the inevitable intrusion of CGI – but crucially, it’s used chiefly to enhance physical animatronics, not to create cartoonish animation (which, in the blu-ray supplements, the director rightly decries as horrible: well said, Matthijs). And there are at least a couple of genuinely shocking transformation sequences which deserve a look from confirmed Thingophiles: the first in a helicopter, about to airlift a suspected Thing victim to safety (and involving a truly ghastly eruption of tentacles, à la Doc Copper, in a tightly-confined space), the second when a hand unexpectedly detaches itself and crawls, centipede-like, up a crazy Swede’s arm to snack on his face. Yep, that’s pretty repulsive. Other effects are less startling, but well-executed (including an explanatory sequence showing how a composite Thing, found charred and smouldering in ’82, actually came about).

The end title sequence brings Thing ‘11 full circle with Thing ’82, set to a lovely reprise of Morricone’s signature “Desolation” theme (misidentified as “Humanity Part II” on the original Varèse Sarabande soundtrack release); it left this reviewer, for one, grinning ear to ear. In fact, Thing ‘11 strives honourably to maintain a continuity of style with its predecessor; both sharing the widescreen ‘scope format, both using a variant on JC’s preferred Albertus font for the titles, both employing “electronic heartbeat” music cues. However, there is a major failure of continuity between ’11 and ’82: remember the grainy video footage of the Norwegians using thermite charges to thaw out the saucer, during which they inadvertently blow it to bits? Well, the makers of Thing ‘11 apparently don’t – unless they were forced to ignore it for creative reasons. (The big finish inside the alien ship wouldn’t have been possible if it had already been destroyed, after all.) To most this will be a trifling niggle, though it will likely attract a gnashing of teeth from JC fanatics; knowing perfection is possible, they’re less inclined to forgive a join that’s less than seamless. And there’s the rub: while Thingophiles are the prime audience for a prequel, they’re also likely to be its loudest critics. With that in mind, it’s much to their credit – and to this critic’s surprise – that the Thing ’11 crew gave such minor grounds for complaint. It’s no masterpiece, but this new Thing has nothing to be ashamed of. And there aren’t many premaginakes that can say that.