Sunday, April 29, 2012

THE THING



I've done a few entries here discussing movies, and in some cases bad-mouthing them in terms that most people would find less than flattering. It's a common practice on the internet to heap disproportionately gargantuan vats of bile and venom on anything that even displeases you mildly, often without taking a few moments to consider the exaggerated nature of the claims. Sometimes the exaggeration is for humorous effect (such as when I say Michael Bay should be force-fed his entire filmography in laserdisc format), and isn't meant to be taken seriously. But, somehow, I get the nagging feeling that a number of people actually seem to mean what they say, regardless of how ridiculous and over-the-top their rhetoric.

Film is definitely one area of discussion where people show a tendency to let fly with incredibly negative, dismissive criticism, disregarding in one or two sentences works that very likely took at least a year, if not several years, to complete. I still do it myself on occasion, though in recent times I've tried to tone down the intensity of my words when talking about movies I didn't like or, what's more likely, failed to impress me strongly one way or the other.

Movies take a lot of work to produce. It's hard to see that when you're watching one, mainly because we're accustomed to passively consuming moving images—a practice many of us have engaged in from the time we were old enough to turn on a TV—without giving a thought to the process required to create those images in the first place. Even self-identified cinephiles often seem to possess only a vague, cloudy notion of what it means for a movie to have been produced, written, directed, or in any way brought into being by filmmakers. Most film fans do not make movies themselves, so it's easy to forget the immense amount of labor that goes into a production, from low-budget indies to mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters.

Watch the behind-the-scenes featurettes on many DVDs and you see what I mean: massive sets that require teams of professional tradespeople to build, working from careful designs commissioned by the producers. Lighting and camera placements involving tons of expensive equipment. Costumes, makeup, special effects, stunts, dialogue coaches, script supervisors, and dozens—if not hundreds—of other tasks and specialists all have to be closely managed and supervised in order for any movie to exist. Chances are, the better the movie looks, the greater the amount of work that went into making it.

The point I'm trying to make is that, any time you watch a movie, even one that falls far short of your expectations, you should probably take a moment to consider all of that time and work, and all of the hopes and ambitions of the people who went through the trouble to create what you've been zoning out to while sitting on the couch eating frozen pizza.

But as with all endeavors, the results aren't always good. Anyone who has sat through an awful movie can attest to that. I'm sure Night Patrol took a lot of effort on the part of everyone involved to see it through to the final stages, but it's still a worthless piece of shit. Seriously, watch that movie and tell me you don't want to beat the Unknown Comic with a crowbar at least a little bit. (Anyone reading this too young to remember who the Unknown Comic was, he was a barely-talented stand-up with an act based on awful puns and wearing a paper bad over his head. He got popular some time around the late 70's/early 80's, and eventually made one of the single worst comedies of all time, the aforementioned Night Patrol.)

Other times—if not most times—you wind up with mediocrity, which makes this as good a place as any to take a look at the recent remake/prequel to John Carpenter's groundbreaking remake of The Thing From Another World. Considering it's a prequel, the filmmakers made the odd decision to give it the exact same title as the movie it's connected to. Wouldn't The Thing Begins or The Birth Of The Thing or What The Fuck Is That Thing have been better options? Something to set it apart from what is, in just about every way, a superior original? At least it might cut down on any confusion between a classic and a so-so imitation.

I remember when Carpenter's Thing came out in '82. I was too young at the time to go see it in a theater, but my older sister wasn't. What she told me of itgrotesque, mind-boggling physical transformations of a kind never attempted in a movie beforecaptivated me, and I had to wait a few impatient years before I was able to see it on VHS at the local library (this was before my parents bought a VCR). She didn't liethe effects were gross, outrageous, surprising, and unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was one of those movies, like Jurassic Park about a decade later, that opened up a new world of possibilities for film, provided the filmmakers had the imagination (and access to funding) to use the cutting-edge techniques to their fullest potential.
Yes, this is gross.  It's also groundbreaking.

The important thing to remember is that special effects of the sort featured in Carpenter's film were brand new at the time. A number of horror movies in the early 80's made use of a combination of latex appliances, puppetry, and animatronics to push toward the next step in movie magic, most notably with Rick Baker's Academy Award-winning work in An American Werewolf In London and Rob Bottin's no less-impressive nightmare werewolves in The Howling. Like the T. Rex in Jurassic, these never-before-seen creatures caused viewers jaws to drop. It was an exciting moment in cinema history.

Also, Carpenter being Carpenter, he populated his film with down-to-earth, blue collar characters, not all that different from the kind of people encountered in the first Alien. They're easy to relate to. It helps immeasurably that he put together a cast that could lend that quality to the characters through screen presence alone—there's nothing more folksy on this Earth than “Quaker Oats” Wilford Brimley, and no one who looks more world-weary and fed up with peoples' bullshit than Keith David.
 He's had it up to here with this Thing bullshit

 These kinds of characters, along with the completely unknown nature of the alien creature they're forced to battle, adds a natural and uncontrived layer of suspense to the film. The Thing can look like any person or animal, it could be one of the very people upon which your life depends. The film does a lot with this idea, and it works because it's easy for viewers to put themselves in the situation and feel the same all-consuming paranoia.

When we come to the remake, the circumstances have changed. Here we are in the early 21st century, and movies make such ubiquitous use of CG effects that it's more noteworthy when you don't see them. In the case of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, you fully expect it. Why wouldn't you? It's how movies are made now. There's nothing very special about it, and the more time goes by, the less impressed moviegoers tend to be with the sight of digital white noise flailing around onscreen. I found that to be the case with the first two Transformers movies: the action looked like a lot of cubist shapes mating with Legos. Sure, a ton of work goes into creating digital effects, and some of it does look damn good, but market saturation has significantly devalued the product.

The creature effects for the new Thing are, as far as I could tell, entirely digital—at any rate, if there are any physical effects, they get lost in the shuffle. This allows for scenes not possible in the Carpenter version: grotesquely deformed and misshapen human beings walk around on their freakish appendages in full view, and chase after their prey. The Thing designs borrow heavily from the older versions, and this winds up being a problem. They hew so closely to Rob Bottin's ideas that they don't really bring anything new to the concept. On top of that, the designers don't seem all that inspired by what they've borrowed. In Carpenter's Thing, part of the horror one feels at the sight of these monsters is that they seem capable of turning into any and all combinations of organic life, as if somebody stuck parts of every animal on Earth in a food processor and spiked them with mescaline. Here, we get spider legs, crab claws, tentacles, and toothy vagina-mouths. That's pretty much it, unless you want to count the fact that some of these squiggly monsters have the faces of Thing-ified characters poking out of them.

There are some problems with the writing as well. None of the characters really stand out (although this may be as much a problem with the casting), and so there's no reason to be very invested in what's happening onscreen. There's a young scientist invited by her boss to come out to Arctic and see this weird block of ice found by a group of Norwegian researchers (all of the action takes place at the abandoned base explored by Kurt Russell in the original), a subject about which he insists on being unnecessarily cryptic. I mean, why not just come right out and say, “They found some crazy shit in the Arctic and it might be an alien!” I know I'd be excited. Even if he feels he shouldn't divulge too much for fear she might blab to her boyfriend or mom or somebody, does he have to keep her completely in the dark like this is some kind of Special Forces Black Ops mission? It's a tactic the writer employs to make him appear shady, untrustworthy, and arrogant, and that's about as interesting as he gets. This is a stock character in any number of horror/sci-fi movies, going at least as far back as Paul Reiser's weaselly corporate lackey from Aliens, though I detect some elements of the mad scientists from 50's sci-fi movies in there too.

Our young scientist, in the course of events, figures out the nature of the alien creature that is overtaking them. In fact, she figures it out in no time flat, almost as if she's seen the first movie. I had a really hard time suspending disbelief on this point. Wilford Brimley's character took a while to come around to his final conclusion that the alien took over the cells of its host and copied them flawlessly. We even see him watching a computer simulation and trying to work it out, giving us the sense that all of this is just too strange and otherworldly to understand without some serious thinking. Yet this character just snaps her fingers and says “I've got it! The alien takes over its host and copies its cells!” after what appears to be a few minutes of lab work.  She doesn't fiddle with any test tubes or bunsun burners, doesn't agonize over her hypothesis, she just figures it out and the film goes on about its business. I understand that the filmmakers don't want to waste much time explaining something to the audience that they might already know, but still, couldn't they have made these scenes a little more convincing? Is she that much smarter than Wilford Brimley? Is anybody?
Wilford says no

A lack of engaging characters means most of the movie hinges on the Thing effects, and as I've said, there's not much new going on there. Images such as these have been a staple of horror and science fiction, as well as many video games, for decades, and I can't help but think that relying on computerized monster squids with crab legs and vaginas was something of a miscalculation. In a way, the new Thing suffers from the same disadvantages as the Star Wars prequels. Instead of pushing the boundaries of fantasy filmmaking, they offer up the same thing you can catch any day of the week at the multiplex, on Netflix, or in the Redbox. Shit, The Phantom Menace came out in the wake of The Matrix, probably the first movie since the original Star Wars to have such a profound and lasting effect on popular culture. When big-budget, video game special effects are so commonplace, a good story and strong characters become more important than ever, and a failure to recognize that means running the risk of having a very expensive, very labor-intensive project disappear from the popular consciousness like a puff of smoke in a high wind.
Or a vagina-mouth in a hurricane of tentacles


No comments:

Post a Comment