First of all, like many others I have to say that I am a huge fan of John Carpenter's The Thing. I was looking forward to the Norwegian prequel as I love Ronald D Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica and thought he would really nail this as well if he wrote the screenplay. I first saw The Thing on VHS at the age of 16 over 20 years after it originally was released in theatres. What I loved about the film was the tension created based on the characters' paranoia of not knowing who to really trust to be a human. It was this quality that I believe made the film as compelling as it was. The monster effects were very impressive for their time, but for me they came secondary to the paranoia aspect of the film.
So if this is to be an actual faithful prequel, any fan of The Thing should accept Kurt Russell's monologue that the alien has tendencies to strike only when it is alone with another person and will try to take the whole group over slowly by hiding amongst them. The problem with this so-called prequel is that the alien does anything but that. We are treated with plenty of gross out monster revealing effects where the alien straight up attacks the humans, sometimes taking out three humans at a time. This action completely undermines the original where the idea was that the Thing was vulnerable when it was out in the open. All this prequel provides is gross images of a monster that attacks humans who then fight back with whatever weapons they have on hand. This aspect got boring really fast, whereas the paranoia aspect of the original played a very minimal role in this film. When a character was revealed to be a Thing, it really had no impact at all as there was not enough character development to really care about it. I realize Carpenter didn't have much more character development, but he still had enough for the audience to be blown away when the creature chose to reveal itself.
Yet the most flawed trait of this film could be pointed out by a young Stephen Spielberg or Ridley Scott 30 years before this film was even made. Much like Spielberg's shark in Jaws or Scott's original Alien, the alien in Carpenter's The Thing was hardly ever shown. The tension that was created from all these films was built off of what was not seen. The audience knows that the monster is a real threat to the characters and we also feel the tension of how the characters treat each other because of this threat. It was this aspect of these films that worked so well, not the violent gross out special effects of monsters attacking humans.
To summarize, I was highly disappointed with this film and would rank it with The X-Files: I Want to Believe as the worst movie I have ever gone to see in theatres. Fans of Carpenter's The Thing will not benefit in the slightest from seeing this film and the so-called tie-ins are so shallow that it is better to preserve the mystery of the Norwegians that the original film created.
So if this is to be an actual faithful prequel, any fan of The Thing should accept Kurt Russell's monologue that the alien has tendencies to strike only when it is alone with another person and will try to take the whole group over slowly by hiding amongst them. The problem with this so-called prequel is that the alien does anything but that. We are treated with plenty of gross out monster revealing effects where the alien straight up attacks the humans, sometimes taking out three humans at a time. This action completely undermines the original where the idea was that the Thing was vulnerable when it was out in the open. All this prequel provides is gross images of a monster that attacks humans who then fight back with whatever weapons they have on hand. This aspect got boring really fast, whereas the paranoia aspect of the original played a very minimal role in this film. When a character was revealed to be a Thing, it really had no impact at all as there was not enough character development to really care about it. I realize Carpenter didn't have much more character development, but he still had enough for the audience to be blown away when the creature chose to reveal itself.
Yet the most flawed trait of this film could be pointed out by a young Stephen Spielberg or Ridley Scott 30 years before this film was even made. Much like Spielberg's shark in Jaws or Scott's original Alien, the alien in Carpenter's The Thing was hardly ever shown. The tension that was created from all these films was built off of what was not seen. The audience knows that the monster is a real threat to the characters and we also feel the tension of how the characters treat each other because of this threat. It was this aspect of these films that worked so well, not the violent gross out special effects of monsters attacking humans.
To summarize, I was highly disappointed with this film and would rank it with The X-Files: I Want to Believe as the worst movie I have ever gone to see in theatres. Fans of Carpenter's The Thing will not benefit in the slightest from seeing this film and the so-called tie-ins are so shallow that it is better to preserve the mystery of the Norwegians that the original film created.