I just have to ask: Why does Hollywood keep remaking perfectly good films? The latest example is The Thing, a new "horror" movie from first-time director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. (Try saying that three times fast.) Although the film is not complete garbage, it is aggressively mediocre, especially in comparison to the 1982 original.
Before watching the film, I told myself I wouldn't make comparisons to past adaptations. Sadly, with The Thing, that's impossible to avoid. The film is a prequel, and it begins with a Norwegian scientist (Ulrich Thomsen) asking an American paleontologist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to accompany him to an archeological dig site in Antarctica. She arrives to find that the team stationed there has discovered some sort of spaceship, as well as an alien lifeform frozen in the ice. Predictably, it escapes, and they discover that it can copy the appearance of any living thing. From there, things simply go downhill, devolving into a paranoid gore-fest, though without the chilling suspense and developed characters of the original John Carpenter effort.
The main problem with The Thing is that it lacks developed suspense. The key to any good horror movie is tension. Unfortunately, rather than allowing for any substantial buildup, Heijningen goes for the cheap scares, shifting between a totally innocuous scene to a jolting moment when the beast appears. I use the word "jolting" loosely, as I only jumped once, and that was because the scene was so loud that it hurt my ears. The result: boring predictability. Every person in the audience could tell who the alien had replicated and when it was going to strike. In fact, the only unpredictable aspect of the film was the manner in which the monster would murder. The kills were gory and disturbing, but not unexpectedly
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