The Thing

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Yummy cute goth girl put that eyeliner back on!

― Graham (graham), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:22 (10 years ago) Permalink

I thought this was going to be a thread about DA THANG

― vic (vicc13), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:23 (10 years ago) Permalink

and then they DON'T lez up = it is intended to be read a tragedy!!

(the caffeine (= coke obv) scene = brilliant loving parody of the scalpel/test-tubes scene)

― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:25 (10 years ago) Permalink

Oh you are talking baout that movie with Jordana Brewster?! I like it, even though it has Josh Hartnett on it

― vic (vicc13), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:32 (10 years ago) Permalink

the gothgirl is cute but the end-result monster is lame

― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:35 (10 years ago) Permalink

Who is the goth gurl. I know its not Jordana OH i remembered is the gurl that ALWAYS plays goths. Jordana kiks her ass

― vic (vicc13), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:41 (10 years ago) Permalink

clea duvall:

jordana = cookiecutter brunette "looker" zzzzz

― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 8 September 2002 21:46 (10 years ago) Permalink

YOU WANNA DO A TAKING SIDES WITH THEM BOTH?!

Hott brasilian-american with wonderful hair

and goth poseur(real goths have black hair)

― Chupa-Cabras (vicc13), Sunday, 8 September 2002 22:02 (10 years ago) Permalink

clea was good in but im a cheerleader

― boxcubed (boxcubed), Sunday, 8 September 2002 22:03 (10 years ago) Permalink

R-R-R-ROWR:

(Actually I only like her cos she reminds me of dreamy skate-punk princess Lois, who has way better hair)

― Graham (graham), Sunday, 8 September 2002 22:49 (10 years ago) Permalink

5 months pass...

Getting back to The Thing, there's an Antarctic blog called Big Dead Place that has a fun Antarctic-biased review of it

― Chris Barrus (xibalba), Monday, 24 February 2003 23:53 (10 years ago) Permalink

10 months pass...

is this another of those "i watched the movie having read a long-ago thread on it then went back and looked at the thread and all these k-brill concepts i imagined were in the thread as i watched the move really were my own... OR WERE THEY?" moments? (I had a massive one with the Pullman series)

coz ok i just watched the movie and then "remembered" this whole mark s bit where he's totally sympathizing with the "thing" and spins this great hypothesis about how mcready is clearly "thing" but has decided by the strength of his will to be human that it doesn't matter. and also about how the "thing" is always in us, and in fact is our mutual fear and at the end, reduced to panic, everyone is reduced to "fire cleans all" which is as unscientific as you can get (and clearly the surface-opposition is science v. grotesque).

also about how blair ceases to panic and becomes "okay" when he reaches the same conclusion w/r/t the "thing" -- i.e. that it doesn't matter.

all of which i guess is part of the "so what if the thing imitates us exactly" except it's also all the BAD things the thing does are entirely human. except the thing gets to make k-cool spaceships too!

i may also have read all this elsewhere.

okay I need to read the book and see "the faculty" now.

also the initial scene with the thing and the dogs is totally horrifying as is the arms-getting-chomped scene, and the way the narrative closure with the two burned stations kicks this whole "statement of human nature" thing into high-gear.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 06:21 (9 years ago) Permalink

all my best work = completely in other people's hedz

(if true, this is the coolest thing evah btw) (best aspect: it can be totally real and totally unproveable simultaneously)

― mark s (mark s), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 14:51 (9 years ago) Permalink

You can make this help you vis a vis If...the book: find a head, open it up and scoop out contents, put CPU of your computah in the hole and you will bne
DOING YOU BEST WORK IN SOMEONE ELSES HEAD.

― Pete (Pete), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 16:34 (9 years ago) Permalink

I'm sad because Jel stole by joke.

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 17:44 (9 years ago) Permalink

Its this thing.

― Pete (Pete), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 17:45 (9 years ago) Permalink

(I hab a code.)

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 17:46 (9 years ago) Permalink

okay check this too -- thing only strikes between individuals, not in a group, so v. v. obv that which lurks behind the veneer of social convention and perfect candidate for Lacanian reading w/r/t "there is no big Other" i.e. that the rules of interaction of the crew are a necessary fiction, reinforced when everyone thinks mcready is the thing but follow him anyway. hence the basis of their downfall is their exile of blair -- safer to stay close to the thing than let it lurk.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 17:53 (9 years ago) Permalink

"also about how blair ceases to panic and becomes "okay" when he reaches the same conclusion w/r/t the "thing" -- i.e. that it doesn't matter"

I thought that Blair WAS a "thing" by that point, that it had assimilated him just before he could hang himself (a noose in the background, isn't there?). But according to this, realising a lack of difference between the thing and the not-thing = becoming the thing-in-itself?

― Neil Willett (Neil Willett), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 20:13 (9 years ago) Permalink

I saw "The Thing" again recently. Popular art-rockers ESTEL were using it as visuals to a concert of theirs. I was sitting beside a guy who had never seen it before, and his "HOLY FUCK" reaction to the "You've got to be fucking kidding" bit was a joy to behold.

so maybe I do like this film after all.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 23:21 (9 years ago) Permalink

I watched this again over winter break, and I must have spent an hour as I tried to fall asleep that night contemplating possible events that could transpire in the minutes after the film ends. I realize how beside the point this is, sorry. At the end of the movie, do the two guys left even have any materials left with which to burn themselves? Do they even have a lighter and a knife so that they could at least perform a Thing test on themselves? If one of them was a Thing, would it even allow either one of those things to happen, or is it busy attacking the other guy as the credits roll?

― Dan I., Wednesday, 14 January 2004 00:19 (9 years ago) Permalink

neil that's a fantastic gag!

Dan I think the point is that it's just the two of them, so the "thing" could obviously just eat the other since there's no other people around to get in its way, or it could just wait until they both froze and only it would wake up, or etc. i.e. there's nothing to be done.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 14 January 2004 00:43 (9 years ago) Permalink

mark s:
i suspect childs's thing-dom is kept exactly as ambiguous

i like the dig at humanity: the ultra-perceptive dogs realize that the new dog is the thing within 20 seconds, we have to watch a 90 minute movie and still don't know!*

*i think we do know though... in the last scene when Childs takes a pull of whiskey, MacReady shoots him a kinda "knowing" glance, which i interpreted as "why the hell would the thing be drinking alcohol?"... the thing wants to proliferate, not impede it's spread by killing it's own cells with alcohol!

also, there's this i ran across while trying researching spelling.

RayM:
Also, do you think there's a clue as to where Blair gets infected>
short scene: the dog walks down the hall into blair's(?) room and the shadow of blair's head(?) turns his head real quick followed by a quick fade to black edit.

other thoughts:
i was impressed on how well the thing always cleaned up after itself off-camera because on-camera it was always making a bloody gooey mess.

― gygax! (gygax!), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 18:06 (9 years ago) Permalink

shoot, that link was supposed to be to the IMDB message board for the thing, not necessarily that post in particular.

― gygax! (gygax!), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 18:07 (9 years ago) Permalink

A long time ago I did a report at school comparing The Thing to this book. (Probably terrible writing and I don't have it any more, but anyways.) I don't know if anyone ever explicitly acknowledged a debt, but there are big similarities. Maybe it's a case of second-hand influence or something. Regardless I think this movie in fact does more justice than any other movie to the style of HP Lovecraft writing. Which is really cool, seeing that aside from his cult followers- his stuff gets a lot less use than it should, after doing more than anyone else to influence the best and most popular of the horror genre like Stephen King. I've seen it written that many horror movie fans are waiting for the day when someone does a really good Lovecraft movie (with arguable exceptions like the comedic Reanimator or Dagon) but until then The Thing comes closest.

― sucka (sucka), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 23:39 (9 years ago) Permalink

interesting... that Lovecraft story predates "Who Goes There" by a couple (2) years.

― gygax! (gygax!), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 23:44 (9 years ago) Permalink

John Campbell who wrote "Who Goes There" was editor of a famous 40's pulp sci-fi magazine who would have been familar with Lovecraft, but the Lovecraft story is less close to "Who goes there" and Howard Hawk's Thing than it is to John Carpenter's (I think the original just ends with killing the space monster, but Carpenter's has apocalyptic implications). Love to read that Anne Billson book to find out if I actually have a point or not.

― sucka (sucka), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 00:35 (9 years ago) Permalink

I always figured the shadow in the room was Palmer (the constantly stoned guy). It looked like him, anyway.

― Gear! (Gear!), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 00:51 (9 years ago) Permalink

I don't know if anyone ever explicitly acknowledged a debt, but there are big similarities.

Occasional poster Matt Maxwell mentioned this in conversation to me a few years back; it's an understandable comparison to draw.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 01:39 (9 years ago) Permalink

Cool ned! I'm a big Lovecraft fan and this was always one of my favorite horror movies.

― sucka (sucka), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 03:50 (9 years ago) Permalink

I am not aware of any big similarities between The Thing and At The Mountains Of Madness.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 16:41 (9 years ago) Permalink

There's this thing called a 'setting,' see. (And beyond that I can think of others.)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 16:47 (9 years ago) Permalink

yeah, setting, yeah. then there is also things that come with the setting, like snow, dogs, it being very cold, and so on. but one of them features a lost city of the Elder Race, while the other doesn't. And one of them features a shape-shifting alien that infects people, and the other doesn't.

crucially, there are no mountains in The Thing, or giant penguins, or shoggoths.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 17:01 (9 years ago) Permalink

Those giant penguins, I like them.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 17:17 (9 years ago) Permalink

I wish there were real giant penguins.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 17:25 (9 years ago) Permalink

Named Opus.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 17:28 (9 years ago) Permalink

the Thing vs. Mountains of Madness shares some plot. (Really searching the memory so some of this might be wrong).

-In Mountains of Madness, before discovering the mountains, the Antarctic expedition from Miskatonic U. used special drills and dug up what they thought were petrified remains of an unknown life form. The remains are left on a dissection table in a tent. They turn out not to be petrified at all, the heat allows them to revive, and they eat everybody in the camp. The 2 main characters have been away on a scouting trip in a plane, and they return and find nothing but tracks in the snow. For the rest of the book they are haunted by what might, or might not be the Old Ones hunting them outside in the snow (they can't tell if it's howling or just the wind.)

In the movie the frozen alien was left to thaw on a dissection table, and ate an entire Norwegian outpost leaving nothing but tracks. The two main character Americans figure this out after a helicopter trip. When they return to their base they are haunted for the rest of the movie by what might, or might not be the alien hunting them in the shape of their friends.

-If I remember right, Carpenter's vs. of The Thing has some kinds of hints that the shapeshifter was able to reach populated areas, but the two remaining characters are already going to die and can't warn anybody. A paranoid, doomy ending instead of a victory (like in the original movie) is a pretty Lovecraftian touch.

― sucka (sucka), Thursday, 22 January 2004 05:55 (9 years ago) Permalink

the feel of the stories is very different. Lovecraft's is cosmic horror (ohmygod, human life was created by aliens! (a new and exciting concept in the 1920s)) while The Thing is more visceral horror (ohmygod, I am being eaten by aliens!).

the ancient things in the Lovecraft story are not like the Thing (although arguably the shoggoths kind of are).

anyway, tekeli-li.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Thursday, 22 January 2004 10:23 (9 years ago) Permalink

1 month passes...

All I could think of when I watched this movie last night (on my new dvd, hooray) was that all poor MacReady wants to do is go up to his shack and drink, and that it's pretty rude of the Thing to keep a man from his shack-drinkin'.

― Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 1 March 2004 20:04 (9 years ago) Permalink

5 years pass...

Really cool story, the movie retold from the Thing's perspective: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

The last line is pretty cringey though

― Dan I., Monday, 11 January 2010 08:53 (3 years ago) Permalink

re: Carpenter and Lovecraft: anybody seen In The Mouth of Madness? I watched it with some friends and the general consensus was that it did a great job of capturing the feel of Lovecraft, but we were all v. high and I am having trouble remembering specifics.

― I got gin but I'm not a ginger (bernard snowy), Monday, 11 January 2010 12:42 (3 years ago) Permalink

2 months pass...

I knew about the reboot or whatever but wait a goddamn minute:

So what makes "The Thing" different? First off, the film isn't so much a remake as a prequel, or what the producers are calling a companion piece to the original. As "Thing" fans may recall, early in the film, trying to understand why a Norwegian helicopter had been chasing a runaway husky before it crashed, Kurt Russell returns to the Norwegian base camp where he finds evidence that its research team -- now all dead -- had dug something out of the ice, apparently awakening an extraterrestrial creature that had been buried for thousands of years.
"That's the story we tell in this film," says Marc Abraham, who is producing the movie with his Strike Entertainment partner Eric Newman. "We go back to that original Norwegian camp and try to figure out what happened. It's like a crime scene, with an ax in the door, and the audience gets to be the detective, trying to piece together what horrible things have occurred."

In the fine tradition of the prequel to The Exorcist.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 19:23 (3 years ago) Permalink

except... that there was a fairly recent video game that covered all this ground already!

― ✌.✰|ʘ‿ʘ|✰.✌ (Steve Shasta), Tuesday, 16 March 2010 20:11 (3 years ago) Permalink

Kinda thinking about playing that at some point, just out of curiosity. I heard that it was kind of a buggy mess, but still interesting? It might already be too dated to go back to, though...

― Nhex, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 20:19 (3 years ago) Permalink

really great game imo. i bet it would still play great. has a nice squad system and manages to work in some nice scares. quite tough tho.

― aarrissi-a-roni, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 20:28 (3 years ago) Permalink

haha the biologist who goes crazy and builds a spaceship in a cave in the ice = called BLAIR do you SEE?

wait, um no I don't see!

what was Mark on about here...?

― Get the Flaps Out (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 16 March 2010 21:16 (3 years ago) Permalink

probably a Tony Blair reference...?

― smoking cigarette shades? it doesn't even make any sense. (HI DERE), Tuesday, 16 March 2010 21:22 (3 years ago) Permalink

or the facts of life

― kingkongvsgodzilla, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 21:26 (3 years ago) Permalink

I thought the game was a sequel rather than a prequel

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 21:56 (3 years ago) Permalink

if it wasn't though it should have been

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 16 March 2010 21:57 (3 years ago) Permalink

Skipping 481 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

you are so otm with all of what you just said, kingfish

I will *double* otm you :)

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 9 April 2012 16:32 (1 year ago) Permalink

"uh guys we've still got 20 minutes of movie left to fill in, whaddya wanna do? I dunno. Show em inside the ship maybe?" So dumb.

Didn't this start with the re-release/re-edited Close Encounters: The Special Edition?

― Reality Check Cashing Services (Elvis Telecom), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:41 (1 year ago) Permalink

I haven't seen that version. Tell me they did not do that.

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:42 (1 year ago) Permalink

They did, but I want to say Spielberg considers it a mistake, like the walkie-talkie for guns swap and CGI E.T. in "E.T." He still did it, though.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:59 (1 year ago) Permalink

Yeah, he did it under studio pressure because he was never happy with the film as released, and wanted to do some additional editing. His preferred cut is kind of a weird hybrid of the original and "special edition" edits minus the inside-the-ship stuff.

― Frank Youngenstein (Phil D.), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 02:13 (1 year ago) Permalink

yuk

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 02:18 (1 year ago) Permalink

it's weird that he dissatisfied with the original cut/version/whatever. it was critically lauded and hugely popular at the time, certainly one of my favorite spielberg films.

― preternatural concepts concerning variances in sound and texture (contenderizer), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 03:13 (1 year ago) Permalink

I know, mine too!

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 03:17 (1 year ago) Permalink

the dvd/blu-ray has all of the various cuts btw so it's not like a star wars scenario

― I cannot host as my wife hates Walker (latebloomer), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 03:21 (1 year ago) Permalink

Yeah, ET, too, has both versions on it.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 03:21 (1 year ago) Permalink

I think we have an old dvd editon, never upgraded to a blu-version

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 03:23 (1 year ago) Permalink

if you have the older dvd, then it's probably Spielberg's hybrid cut, which is pretty close to the original cut with some of the special edition scenes spliced in (minus the "inside the ship" scene).

iirc before the movie was on dvd the only version available for many years was the special edition.

― I cannot host as my wife hates Walker (latebloomer), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 03:32 (1 year ago) Permalink

and it made the same stupid mistake that Super 8 made in its shonky ending. I DON'T WANT TO SEE INSIDE THE SHIP if you don't know how to end the bloody movie. That's not an exciting thing that needs to happen if the story's pretty much over with. It's like, "uh guys we've still got 20 minutes of movie left to fill in, whaddya wanna do? I dunno. Show em inside the ship maybe?" So dumb.

I don't quite get this...? Super 8 never showed us the inside of the ship (since SPOILER! SPOILER! it literally ended with the ship being put together and flying away). The alien itself was only properly shown in the finale though, but that was necessary to establish the connection between it and the kid (since SPOILER! the big theme in the movie was forgiveness, and the connection between helped the alien to forgive the human race and move on), because in the end Super 8 wasn't a horror movie but an E.T. variation. I agree with your point in general, but I don't see how Super 8 is an example.

― Tuomas, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 07:21 (1 year ago) Permalink

6 months pass...

the most unrealistic part of this movie is that MacReady would waste both good liquor and his only friend/source of entertainment in the opening. although maybe he has a huge stockpile of booze and back-up Chess Wizard computers in his shack, wouldn't put it past him.

― have a sandwich or ice cream sandwich (Jordan), Thursday, 1 November 2012 15:34 (6 months ago) Permalink

2 months pass...

childs is such a fascinating and singular character. definitely holding the place of the "#2" in the film and meant to be on par w/macready in strength and conviction and technically an ally in the "action film" sense but also spending much of the film diametrically opposed to macready and his theories. i recognize this stems from the crushing paranoia of the film but in probably most other hands childs would be macready's bff and would stand fast with him every step of the way, and also he'd probably die 2/3rds of the way in.

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Tuesday, 8 January 2013 23:16 (4 months ago) Permalink

in most other movies childs would be the first guy killed why because he's black

― Welcome to my world of proses (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 8 January 2013 23:24 (4 months ago) Permalink

Both black guys in this movie last until the final reel, which is kind of amazing. Not to mention that there are two black guys to begin with.

― Gollum: "Hot, Ready and Smeagol!" (Phil D.), Tuesday, 8 January 2013 23:25 (4 months ago) Permalink

also two jittery dudes
two assholes
two paranoid scientists

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Tuesday, 8 January 2013 23:27 (4 months ago) Permalink

which is kind of amazing

it's def anamolous for the time

― Welcome to my world of proses (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 8 January 2013 23:35 (4 months ago) Permalink

John Carpenter was always pretty good about giving prominent roles to women and non-white actors.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 8 January 2013 23:35 (4 months ago) Permalink

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