The Thing -- 1982 -- R

Been waiting awhile to watch this one. I’ve seen it crop up on list after list of great movies, and not just in the horror category either. It’s got an unlikely title to be a good movie, but great movies are made of character and plot, not out of cornball titles (though a good title does help, I grant).

The Thing is about a group of scientists in the Antarctic who come into possession of a dog that was being chased by a crazy Norweigian with a gun. The first part of the film is a slow build from there as they work to figure out what happened to these Norweigians and what possessed them to chase this dog with firearms. After some digging, they become even more curious about everything when they find the Norweigian camp burned out with a patch outside the camp with a burned, deformed body.

The plot continues to thicken as more discoveries are made and the mystery of the dog is unveiled. It runs like a slow-burning fuse throughout, with the plot continuing to grow and unwind and a nice mix of action, character, plot, and intrigue. All the wonderful freakiness within the plot is fully covered before anything happens, and it manages to keep its secrets and twists to itself until it’s good and ready to reveal them.

When it comes to character, it ran a lot like Alien in that there were quite a few characters with some getting more screen time than others, and some being a bit more recognizable than others. We get a really good sense of who everyone is, however, and when the "infected one" is revealed, it comes as a complete surprise to me. It’s one of those things where it takes a couple of watchings to keep track of everyone, but the film does a fair enough of trying to keep track of so many characters and making us care enough to stay glued.

When it comes to originality here, it does lack a little bit. There are a few original elements, and it does enough to make us forget that we’ve seen similar things before, but that Alien reference is but one familiarity here. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a huge similarity, since one thing this alien does is duplicate the DNA of its host and take over in the host’s body. The whole "aliens are coming down to kill us all" runs a bit tiresome when it comes to film plots as well, and its a central point to this one’s plot.

So it is a retread, but it’s a good one, and one worth watching that a good job was done on. It has some creative elements and enough originality to keep me watching. The characters are better than average for this sort of movie, so when it comes to weighing all the elements out, it works really well, and is a pretty good watch.