All Sightings of the organism from The Thing (1982). Monster Analysis is a series. Horror-meister John Carpenter teams Kurt Russell's outstanding performance with incredible visuals to build this chilling version of the classic The Thing. In the winter of 1982, a twelve-man research team at a remote Antarctic research station discovers an alien buried in the snow for over 100,000 years. Jul 1, 1982 wide. On Disc/Streaming: Aug 28, 2001. Full Review in Spanish. The Thing feels like a perfect movie. An embarrassment of riches all concentrated in a single feature film that. The Thing (1982) Synopsis. Arctic researchers battle an alien organism that assumes the shape of its victims. Read Full Synopsis Cast + Crew John.
John Carpenter's eighth feature, and his first for a major studio, The Thing is an adaptation of John W Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, and a loose remake of Chris Nyby's adaptation The Thing from Another World, scenes from which could be glimpsed on a television set in Carpenter's earlier Halloween. By coincidence, it opened in the US on the same day as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and both films would take some years to win their canonical status in the sci-fi pantheon after an initial drubbing from the majority of critics, who at the time were in thrall to Steven Spielberg's alien-positive E.T., released two weeks earlier. Turtle beach n270 drivers for mac.
The Thing 1982 Full Movie
Yet The Thing fell under the far more sinister influence of another Scott film, Alien, a similarly hybridised mutation of SF and horror in which an isolated working crew has to deal with a deadly extraterrestrial menace with no outside help. So remote from civilisation is the US National Science Institute Station in the Antarctic that it might as well be in space – and the small team operating there finds itself under attack from within by an alien (unearthed by Norwegian researchers from a nearby base) that can rapidly adapt to its environment and makes perverse use of its human hosts to disguise its own presence. In the ensuing mayhem, the base's delicate ecosystem begins irreparably to break down, as the very team who must work together to confront this insidious threat find themselves no longer able to trust each other.
There are significant differences, too. For where Alien boasted an on-board computer nicknamed ‘Mother', a female protagonist and an egg-born nemesis, The Thing is set in an all-male environment, and is as much a study of masculinity in crisis as an update of the sort of siege scenario that Carpenter had already played out in Assault on Precinct 13.
The first time we meet chopper pilot and hero RJ MacReady (Carpenter regular Kurt Russell), a loner who lives apart from the rest of the crew's quarters in a shack outside, he is in the rec room, pouring himself a scotch on ice, and resuming a game of chess – not with one of his companions, but with the computer. 'Poor baby, you're starting to lose it,' he comments, before the Chess Wizard checkmates him. With his masculine ego damaged, MacReady's response is to pour his drink into the computer's circuitry, frying it with the words, 'Cheating bitch.' It is a misogynistic slur (accompanied by an absurd destructive act) against the only presence on the station that might be deemed female – for the Chess Wizard, despite its masculine name, has the distinctive voice of a woman (in fact Carpenter's then wife Adrienne Barbeau).
With that word ‘bitch' still ringing in the audience's ears, Carpenter cuts away to the husky outside, racing from its armed Norwegian pursuers to the relative shelter of the American station – and through the magical implicature of editing, we infer that this new arrival is also a bitch, come to invade this male community with her feminine otherness – even as it smuggles in all the alien cells that will be these men's ultimate undoing.
What follows is a very modern witch hunt, as the station's men attempt to weed out any trace of that femininity from their ranks, and keep replicating MacReady's angry attack on the computer with a self-destructive scorched earth policy that will eventually see them burning their whole base down. In the end, only the manliest, most rugged individualists will be left sort-of standing, but even they still eye one another with mistrust and suspicion. After all, nobody is all man (or all woman), and no one can fully escape the alterity within.
The Thing is rightly adored for its lived-in ensemble performances, its extraordinarily grotesque practical effects (from Rob Bottin, with a little help from Stan Winston), its mood of paranoid claustrophobia, and the pulsing electro-tension of its score (Ennio Morricone does Carpenter!). Yet there is also an appealingly existential quality that comes from the solitude of its setting, the chill wintriness of its climate, and the bleak desperation of its characters' predicament.
For these men are pitted not just against the elements, but against each other and their own inner, hidden selves, in an utterly unforgiving milieu. 'There's nothing else I can do, just wait,' concludes MacReady, halfway through the film, on a private recording that he makes as testament, should they all perish, of what has happened. This is re-echoed by his last words in the film, delivered as he sits outside, illuminated by the fires of the burning camp: 'Why don't we just wait here for a little while, see what happens.'
All this waiting, for what? For the death that he knows is coming? For God – or Godot? For a sign of whether he and/or the other survivor have been overtaken by the alien, or have been stripped down to their own true selves? In any case, MacReady's last gesture in the film is to pass his bottle of J&B to the other survivor. This gesture represents a kind of checkmate: if either one of them is by now not human, the other will inevitably be infected from sharing the bottle. Yet, paradoxically, the gesture, as a signifier of trust and communion, proves that a spark of humanity, if not quite of hope, remains.
The Thing 1982 Movie Online
The Thing is released on 23 October by Arrow Video on Blu-ray as a Limited Edition Steelbook in a brand new restoration from a 4K scan of the original negative, supervised and approved by director John Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey.
Published 23 Oct 2017
John Carpenter's The Thing has everything – physical isolation in an antarctic scientific base, failed communication channels, a coming storm (literal and metaphorical), psychological horror as the threat grows and established friendships crumble, and really, really disgusting monsters that I couldn't take my eyes off. There is a delightful yuck factor to The Thing's Things. (That is genuinely what they are known as. The dog thing is, brilliantly, listed as Dog Thing in a cast list).
A Norwegian helicopter appears in the sky, with a marksman leaning out and firing at an unknown sled dog running loose. Soon the chopper lands but is accidentally destroyed, with the surviving crew member still shooting at the dog until one of the Americans from their own nearby base shoots dead the shooter. The dog survives. Two Americans, helicopter pilot 'Mac' MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Dr Copper (Richard Dysart) fly to the nearby Norwegian scientific station, only to find it burnt out. Their search results in them finding a giant block of ice with the insides chiselled out, a hideously damaged body, and an even more hideous creature lying dead in the snow, charred but with two faces still clearly identifiable.
Taking the thing (they don't know anything about it yet so my editor's decision is that it is still the thing, not The Thing) back to the American scientific base, team biologist Blair (A. Wilford Brimley) performs an autopsy and finds perfect human organs inside. The Norwegians' recordings also lead the Americans to what looks like a space craft in the ice – Norris (Charles Hallahan), the geologist, identifies it as potentially being 100,000 years old because of likely ice movement.
There are several 'hasn't anyone ever watched a horror film' moments, with Copper and MacReady bringing back the thing, and the stray dog later kennelled with the Americans' own sled dogs leading to a hideous dog decimation soon afterwards.
The post-dog autopsy results in Blair surmising that the creature can perfectly assimilate any lifeform from the inside out.
As team members are picked off by (now a proper noun and therefore deserving of initial upper case) The Thing, people also disappear and reappear as they start fearing each other. Equipment is found sabotaged. Decisions are made to isolate individuals. Copper tries to work out how to identify which humans are infected and which not, with a blood serum test, but it's tampered with – cue more paranoia. How do you protect yourself and everyone else? Isolate them? Tie them up? What if they are the ones that you need to come help you later on? What if you're the infected one?
There are some genuinely creepy moments – when we find out that there is 'still cellular activity in the burned remains. They're not dead yet', my spine tingled (luckily nothing shot out of it). It's the kind of film where you study the whole scene, willing characters to turn around because a blanket is twitching. The rising sense of mistrust as people realise that anyone could be infected is palpable.
And although there is a strong element of psychological horror in The Thing, Carpenter doesn't flinch from repeated, disgusting transformations. Considering when the film was made they really are impressive. The creatures are truly hideous. Contorted faces with just enough humanity remaining to be recognisably people, mouths twisted in screams and grimaces, eyes half popping out of sockets, gunk and gunge everywhere, bodies exploding as strange spiky legs appear mid-transformation and scuttle away… usually ending in a screaming fireball as infected Things are incinerated before full assimilation can take place.
The film is 35 years old and apart from the ancient technology it could be set today. Nitro pdf download. And actually the technology is pretty impressive for its time. Yes it brought back memories of dark screens and big coloured type, and they pretty much only have computer chess to amuse themselves, but Blair is able to use the machines to estimate the likelihood of infection affecting someone on the base, and also the chances (not good, frankly) for the wider world if it ever gets out. (And let's face it for people my age, you can't beat a scene with an early 80s tape recorder, even if just brings back memories of pressing Play and Record at the same time to tape the UK Top 40 on a Sunday night).
The sense of isolation on the base is itself menacing, and rising distrust among the group is well-handled (by the time the action starts they have already been without communications for two weeks). Like the best horrors the actual monster is ably assisted by the humans' reactions to the situation they find themselves in. In fact if it was slightly more evolved it could have saved some energy by only taking over a couple of dogs and everyone would still have gone loopy and turned on each other.
The Thing was a commercial and critical failure on release – it came out in 1982, the same year as ET, and I can understand people at the time wanting to watch a cute alien who you can dress up and leave with your children, rather than a Cold War-era allegory channelling our fears about communist invasion and aggression hiding in an even Colder War story involving a hideous creature that leaves victims looking like a human / spider hybrid.
But the passage of time has led to its completely reappraisal and it is now seen as a cult classic. It really is a very good, multilayered film where allegory, bloodshed and paranoia come together – and I'm much more likely to watch it again than ET, though probably not straight after eating my dinner this time.
The ending is bleak, but it has to be. As MacReady says 'When a man bleeds it's just tissue. Blood from one of those things, it'll try to survive.'
Check out my review of the 2011 prequel, The Thing.
