{"id":2370,"date":"2011-10-23T10:22:01","date_gmt":"2011-10-23T18:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2370"},"modified":"2015-10-04T11:13:38","modified_gmt":"2015-10-04T19:13:38","slug":"and-another-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2370","title":{"rendered":"And Another Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\">I went to see &#8220;The Thing&#8221; the other day, and was treated to perhaps the sharpest slice of satire on democratic capitalism I&#8217;d seen in years. It&#8217;s the tale of three vacuous charismatic twentysomethings who go to a movie. They line up in their chairs with Cokes in hand, and \u2014 well, see for yourself:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.be\/embed\/SJ2DoZnQtZI?rel=0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I couldn&#8217;t have shown it better: the world transforming itself into a magical place full of wonder and enchantment while these bubbleheaded morons suck back their Big Gulps and stare slack-jawed at a corporate logo in the sky, utterly oblivious to the world-changing events unfolding around them. I don&#8217;t think there could <em>be <\/em>a more scathing commentary packed into such a short span of seconds. The fact that it was most likely inadvertent<a href=\"#fn1\" name=\"c1\"><sup>1<\/sup><\/a> only adds to the tingle; and the fact that no one else in the audience seemed to get it only sharpens the point.<\/p>\n<p>Too bad the main feature didn&#8217;t live up to the short.<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, I didn&#8217;t really know what to expect from this Thingquel. The official reviews were pretty crappy \u2014 given my recent overdrive head-down push to get this damn novel done by the month&#8217;s end, I seriously considered skipping it entirely \u2014 but then again, Carpenter&#8217;s 1982 version was savaged by the critics upon <em>its<\/em> release, and is today recognised as a classic. Also, as most of you know, I have a certain emotional connection to the franchise. So I put the back end of <em>Dumbspeech<\/em> away for the afternoon, braced myself with a couple of pints, and headed into the Multiplex.<\/p>\n<p>Minor spoilers follow. You have been warned.<\/p>\n<p>To start with, it&#8217;s not as terrible as some folks are saying. There&#8217;s a moment or two of something approaching true pathos on the journey. The variation on the blood-test scene, while not as dramatic as in the original, makes sense. One scene near the end contains either a nice moment of deliberate ambiguity, or a memo from the producers to the effect that the production was going over budget and they&#8217;d have to scale back the CGI on that last bit (I&#8217;m talking about the earring scene, for those of you in the know). And speaking of CGI, I&#8217;m not on board with those who decried its use here; had Rob Bottin had access to that technology back when he was doing Carpenter&#8217;s film, you can be damn sure he would&#8217;ve gone to town with it. The ending of the movie does bolt quite nicely onto the beginning of the &#8217;82 film; and at least I was never bored.<\/p>\n<p>But the fact is, when I first saw <em>The Thing<\/em> back in 1982 I came away thinking that I <em>had<\/em> seen a classic. I didn&#8217;t care how many critics shat on it; I knew what I&#8217;d seen, and I thought it rocked, and in the three decades since my view has remained unshaken. This movie? No fucking way.<\/p>\n<p>For one thing, there are just too many similarities between the two films for me to accept that this is truly a prequel and not just a remake. This goes beyond the fact that both films feature camps mysteriously well-equipped with flamethrowers. Too many plot elements have been cut-and-pasted from one to the other; the direction and cinematography of too many 2011 scenes seem to have dropped through a wormhole from 1982. In both movies, characters under suspicion are locked in the shed; in both, they escape by digging through the floor. Both movies feature scenes in which a group of increasingly-paranoid characters bicker and argue over what to do about the potentially-thinged cast members trapped outside in the storm, and in both cases the argument is cut short when said potential-thingers break into the main building through a window. The 2011 <em>Thing<\/em> has a scene in which parka&#8217;d survivors cluster in the dark around a pile of thingly remains, lit from behind by the lights of their snowcats and wondering how to tell human from imitation; even the framing of that shot was so spot-on that for a moment I actually wondered if they hadn&#8217;t just spliced in footage from the &#8217;82 version as a cost-cutting measure.<\/p>\n<p>Some of this may have been unavoidable. After all, there&#8217;s a logistical limit to how widely divergent scenarios can be when both involve the same shape-shifting alien infiltrating isolated Antarctic research stations. And remakes are not in and of themselves a bad thing; except in this case the director is on record as explicitly stating he didn&#8217;t want to do a remake because the original Carpenter movie was &#8220;perfect&#8221;. There&#8217;s no point in redoing something unless you bring a new perspective to the material. Eric Heisserer&#8217;s script gives us nothing that Carpenter didn&#8217;t do better.<\/p>\n<p>There are other problems, deriving not from the use of CGI in principle so much as from the temptations that result when such technology is too easily invoked: the desire to show cool squick trumps basic storytelling logic. For example, we are shown early on that the Thing can fragment at a whim. An arm will drop off, sprout centipede legs, race across the floor and hump some poor bastard&#8217;s face like the facehugger from <em>Alien<\/em>. Pieces chopped in half will skitter autonomously across the wall, meet up again after work at Starbucks, and reintegrate without a second thought. Given that, we should never see a scene in which the protagonist finds refuge in a space that&#8217;s too small for the alien to follow her into; all the Thing has to do is split into smaller pieces. Except we do, and it doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2376\" style=\"width: 460px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/deformity.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2376\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2376 \" style=\"margin: 10px;\" title=\"deformity\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/deformity.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"450\" height=\"214\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/deformity.jpg 562w, https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/deformity-300x142.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2376\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Seriously?<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also spent the past thirty years assuming that the burned monstrosity MacReady found at the Norwegian camp had been killed in the process of transformation: an alien caught with its pants down and dispatched before it had a chance to zip back up. Now we find out that that wasn&#8217;t the case at all. The Thing morphed into some weird deformity with two upside-down, half-fused faces, a variety of spliced-together bug\/human limbs, and a gait so awkward the damn thing could have been a poster child for spinal meningitis\u2014 and it just kinda <em>leaves<\/em> itself like that, spending the next ten minutes stalking red shirts through the halls. I mean, isn&#8217;t the whole point of the Thing that it <em>blends in<\/em>? And even if it <em>did<\/em> decide that the whole imitation riff had run its course and it was time to come out fighting, wouldn&#8217;t it choose some kick-ass predatory phenotype that was, you know, <em>integrated<\/em>? Why choose an ill-fitting hodgepodge of twisted body parts that wouldn&#8217;t be caught dead together outside some cheap carnival freak show?<\/p>\n<p>Well, obviously, because it looks cool.<\/p>\n<p>Leaving the theatre, I didn&#8217;t feel that I&#8217;d completely wasted my money \u2014 but only because I can write the ticket price off as a tax deduction. I cannot in honesty recommend this film to anyone without the same option. That said, though, I retain a certain fondness for van Heijningen Jr.&#8217;s vision; it may tank on its own merits, but it&#8217;s certainly rebooted interest in <a href=\"http:\/\/clarkesworldmagazine.com\/watts_01_10\/\">my own take<\/a> on the story. io9 posted <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5849758\/an-incredible-brilliant-short-story-told-from-the-perspective-of-the-aliens-in-john-carpenters-the-thing\">a glowing piece<\/a> on &#8220;The Things&#8221;, calling me a &#8220;master of scifi mindfuckery&#8221;. Simon Pegg tweeted its praises. When the movie actually premiered, the twitterverse filled up with don&#8217;t-waste-your-time-on-the-remake-read-Peter-Watts&#8217;s-story-instead messages, a signal boosted by folks ranging from a World Federation Pro Wrestler to the front man for Anthrax. Last I heard it had even landed on the front page of IMDB, which presumably gave Clarkesworld&#8217;s hit count a nice boost.<\/p>\n<p>So, yeah. On balance, I really liked that movie. Just not for any of the reasons that would make you actually go see it.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#c1\" name=\"fn1\"><sup>1<\/sup><\/a>At least, I assume it was inadvertent \u2014 although a part of me hopes that some self-aware realist working in the belly of the beast took an opportunity to shake his ball sack in the faces of the sheep he was helping to fleece, knowing they&#8217;d be too stupid to get the joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went to see &#8220;The Thing&#8221; the other day, and was treated to perhaps the sharpest slice of satire on democratic capitalism I&#8217;d seen in years. It&#8217;s the tale of three vacuous charismatic twentysomethings who go to a movie. They line up in their chairs with Cokes in hand, and \u2014 well, see for yourself: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2370"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6251,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions\/6251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}