'The Thing' review

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Credit: Universal)

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American paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) lands what seems like the opportunity of a lifetime to join a team of Norwegian scientists in Antarctica studying a new life form discovered under the ice. Her dream turns into a nightmare when the creature turns out to be a bloodthirsty extraterrestrial with the unique ability to mimic any life form it encounters.

The buzz: Don’t call it a remake. This “prequel” is set three days before the events in John Carpenter’s celebrated 1982 sci-fi/horror/thriller “The Thing.” Like Carpenter’s film, it’s also inspired by John W. Campbell’s 1938 story “Who Goes There?” which also served as the basis of Howard Hawks’ 1951 classic “The Thing From Another World.” Those are some heavyweight standards to live up to for Dutch commercial director-turned-first time feature filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and screenwriter Eric Heisserer (“Final Destination 5,” the “Nightmare on Elm Street” remake).

The verdict: It may not be a remake, but “The Thing” is certainly a rip-off. Simply changing the hero to a heroine, inserting in-joke nods to Carpenter’s film and slightly tweaking classic sequences like the blood test are not enough to distinguish a strictly by-the-numbers paranoid thriller padded out with graphic violence, jump scares and over-the-top visuals. There’s certainly no shortage of the thing in “The Thing”—the various grotesque fusions of man and monster (rendered in a combination of practical effects honoring Carpenter’s film and contemporary CGI) become the obvious raison d'être. That’ll be enough to thrill creature junkies, while everyone else will quickly tire of the charisma free performances from the cast (also including Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Eric Christian Olsen and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as minimally defined character types) and the production team’s resounding lack of imagination. When it’s not blandly aping Carpenter, the new “Thing” feels like a flavorless entry in the “Alien” series with its no-nonsense heroine and viciously relentless baddies. In the tradition of “Hannibal Rising” and “Exorcist: The Beginning,” “The Thing” is a prequel that’s no match for the film it’s intended to precede.

Did you know? The project’s original screenwriter was “Battlestar Galactica” mastermind Ronald D. Moore, but his script was scrapped along the way.

Follow Metromix's Geoff Berkshire on Twitter: @geoffberkshire

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