While people up and down the country were cremating effigies of Guy Fawkes, an audience at Leeds Town Hall watched monsters of a different kind being set ablaze. Bonfire Night saw the 25th Leeds International Film Festival play host to the UK premiere of Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s debut film The Thing. It’s a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 film (also called The Thing) about a shape-changing parasitic alien which terrorises, imitates and kills the residents of an American research station in Antarctica. The 1982 version is regarded as a classic sci-fi horror, so the 2011 prequel has a lot to live up to.
The new movie tells the full story of the Norwegian research station we see bits of in Carpenter’s film. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (paleontologist Kate Lloyd) is asked by Ulrich Thomsen (Sander Halversen) to investigate a ‘specimen’ found in Antarctica, which is all the information he’ll give her. Intrigued, she agrees to go, and is soon shown the reason for Halversen’s secrecy – the Norwegians have discovered a crashed spaceship and an extra-terrestrial life form buried in the ice. It’s not long before the beastie thaws out and starts butchering and copying everyone, left, right and centre.
Compared to the original film, this is nowhere near as chilling, paranoid or claustrophobic, but as a standalone effort it has a lot going for it. The Things, when they burst from their imitations, are nightmarish and disturbing, with some perversions of the human form so bizarre they would be funny if they weren’t so horrific. Special effects experts Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. have done a sound job, though they still don’t live up to the sheer sick inventiveness of the human-Thing transformations created by Rob Bottin in the original.
A decent stab is made at linking up with what was seen in the 1982 version. Some elements are there, but frustratingly, some aren’t, so it’s kind of successful but not entirely satisfying. Nor are the characters as engaging or the levels of tension as high, though there are enjoyable moments like the checking of people’s fillings to see if they have been freshly imitated, a callback to the gripping blood test scene in the 1982 film.
The Thing has received mostly negative reviews, which I think is a bit harsh – it’s certainly not a great film, but it isn’t bad either. Like its weird shape-shifting antagonist, it is a pretty convincing copy that merely lacks some of the original’s humanity, emotion and imagination.
Rated 15, 103mins.
The Thing is showing as part of the 2011 Leeds International Film Festival before general release on 2nd December.
For more information:
The official website for the Leeds International Film Festival is wwww.leedsfilm.com. The box office number is 0113 224 3801. The LIFF25 Box Office is located in The Carriageworks, located on Millennium Square, Leeds. The box office is open from 10am – 6pm Monday to Saturday and on Sundays when there is a performance at The Carriageworks. Advance tickets and passes can be purchased either online, by phone or in person.
Peter Etherington is a founding member of The Leeds Savage Club, a group of writers and sketchers from around Leeds.