Qt3 Movie Podcast: The Thing (2011)

That’s really the rub of it. The 1982 version is really well scripted. I can’t even think of any plot holes. There should be one or two, right? I don’t remember anything anyone said or did that made me think twice.

That reminds me of some extra details from that review. The reviewer thought that Keith David’s character at the end was the Thing for a couple of reasons. His clothing changed, and he pointed to some suspicious actions during several key events. But the kicker, is that MacReady is offering him scotch/whiskey, which mirrors the scene where he’s checkmated by the computer while playing chess, and pours scotch on it.

That’s a really good point - QuakerOatThing is definitely building a ship at the end of the movie. So there’s some kind of native intelligence involved. I really need to watch this again.

What, no love for the 1951 The Thing from Another World? Eh, it’s just as well. That version was a fairly typical post-atomic “amoral scientists are the real monsters who will doom us all!” screed.

As for the 1982 version, it never even occurred to me that the “infected” were unaware of it. I just assumed that the Thing assimilated its targets and mimicked them for as long as it could get away with. Why then didn’t it have a chat with the humans? Who’s to say? That’s the fun thing about alien psychology. It was at the very least aware enough of its surroundings to know when it had been discovered.

there are always plot holes. time to ruin the thing (1982)!

-why the hell did the three of them split up at the end!? just do the bombs one at a time ffs!

-i always wondered how a bunch of chopper parts could possibly form a spaceship. i mean, yeah they’re smarter than humans, but even if you drop a smart genius inventor human into an ape colony, he’s gonna have a problem making a pencil, let alone an airplane.

-not really a hole, but the thing had a heart attack? it wasn’t faking since it clutched its chest when no one was looking.

-the final plan: would all the fires really warm up everything that much? the thing couldn’t walk a couple city block’s length and bury itself? (going by the dvd ending with the two survivors staring at one another, not the tv ending where a thing dog is running off)

-the little bit of blood in the petri dish explodes into a foot long thing arm. i would have gone with a full finger to get a reaction. but the blood test is better cinema.

You’d be making speculations that run contrary to what the film has shown us. These dudes are research scientists, they surmise that he was building a ship as a means of escape and/or propagation and they immediatley fuck it up with some of their limited supply of dynamite. If the ship wasn’t legitimate, what was the point of including that scene in such a tightly scripted story? It’s hella late in the game for a red herring by this point; IMO the scene cements the tone for the ending in that it’s no longer just about survival, they have to ensure that the Thing remains in Anarctica no matter the cost. Also -the Thing can morph into many shapes, and only a small portion of it (a drop of blood!) needs to be able to fit into the ship to be viable after escape.

I have no problem with the Thing’s intellegence being a sort of genetic gumbo from around the galaxy, though. That much makes sense.

But I think this one actually argues in favor of my argument, that the assimilated individual has no knowledge and exhibits no outward symptoms of thingness. MacCready figures out that a thing will respond to an outward threat - it has no choice. So the doctor guy has been “infected”, if we can call it that, but doesn’t know it and is still in some degree human, even though he’s basically a walking dead man. Then the stress causes a heart attack, a real one, and the dormant thingness remains dormant. But, the doctor uses a defibrillator and introduces a hell of a shock, and I think this wakes up the dormant thing, in the same way the heated wire does in the blood test. And then we’re off.

this one? it mentioned the script delay.

http://www.badassdigest.com/2011/08/19/was-childs-the-thing

Because if they did one at a time, the Thing could just pull the wires from the other ones after they all left? A better question is, why didn’t they just walk around blowing up the place a piece at a time, but they were really sleep-depped at that point and prone to making bad decisions that the audience thinks they wouldn’t.

-i always wondered how a bunch of chopper parts could possibly form a spaceship. i mean, yeah they’re smarter than humans, but even if you drop a smart genius inventor human into an ape colony, he’s gonna have a problem making a pencil, let alone an airplane.

Maybe it was just building an airplane to get to civilization? Or maybe it was way more intelligent as listed above, able to make a spaceship out of transistor radio parts.

-not really a hole, but the thing had a heart attack? it wasn’t faking since it clutched its chest when no one was looking.

Things were not looking good for the creature remaining undiscovered right then, pretending to be dead could give it some cover to escape when the harmless body was left alone. Or maybe it just really wanted to convert some biomass and wanted to lure in some prey.

-the final plan: would all the fires really warm up everything that much? the thing couldn’t walk a couple city block’s length and bury itself? (going by the dvd ending with the two survivors staring at one another, not the tv ending where a thing dog is running off)

You’ll note that even though “the temperature’s way up all over the camp,” Childs and Macready are still bundled up and you can see their breath. It just wasn’t totally super-duper killer freezing.

-the little bit of blood in the petri dish explodes into a foot long thing arm. i would have gone with a full finger to get a reaction. but the blood test is better cinema.

Maybe it was a really thin, hollow arm? But, yeah, it was a way better visual than just making a tiny, comical mouth or something mass-appropriate.

This could also just be that the Thing copied his target too well, including the defect in the man’s heart.

As for the spaceship, they could’ve just misidentified it as being spaceworthy, it might have just been some sort of vehicle to get him to a population center.

Yup, that’s the one, I dug the analysis.

I thought that was OK. When Braxton says he’s going to land, the Thing knows the jig is up; someone down there knows there’s a Thing on this helicopter and it isn’t going to escape now. By crashing the chopper over the ridge, it gets the chance to separate some of the humans (the three on the chopper) rather than allowing them all to regroup; also, it gets a chance to replicate one of them and then try to talk its way back into the base to kill the others and get some new transportation (although it appears this never actually happens, the Thing dies in the crash).

On the issue of infection vs. replacement, in the 2011 version at least people are clearly being replaced. The Thing eats a person and then mimics him. That’s why they keep figuring out who is a Thing by seeing who has inorganic parts. If the Thing is just “infecting” a person, the person would still have their fillings, their arm-bone plate, etc. They don’t have that because the Thing versions are biological copies of the people the Thing killed. I don’t remember whether the 1982 version is clear on this point or not, though.

Dang, the Thing (1982) is pretty cheap on Blu-Ray right now, 11.49 USD. All this talk has me tempted.

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/1662/thing1982.html

The Supplements: Digging Into the Good Stuff

Here’s a weird one. Universal has – for whatever reason – dropped most of the extras that graced the DVD and HD DVD versions of ‘The Thing’ from this Blu-ray. The only supplement that remains untouched is the audio commentary. To be fair, Universal has repurposed the previous releases’ main documentary into a Blu-ray-exclusive picture-in-picture track, but there are still a number of cool materials (rare effects footage, a still gallery) that are missing here. Such omissions really are not acceptable on a next-gen title, as fans who have bought ‘The Thing’ countless times already really deserve a Blu-ray that is all-inclusive. Tsk tsk, Universal.

although the commentary is one of the best extras.

Uh, you would have had the characters chopping each others’ fingers off?

In any case, the blood testing is directly from the original story. The theory is that every individual cell of the Thing is an independent life form with a will to survive. Granted, in the original story all the blood did was try to get away from the heat.

Original book is free to read here: http://www.whogoesthere.info/book.php.

Interesting to think about the era it was written in - the mechanism proposed for the operation of the Thing is clearly rooted in a very old and inaccurate understanding of cell biology, but what I find most fascinating is that it references atomic power at a time (1938) when fission was not yet understood, the neutron had only been known to exist for around 4 years, and the bomb was a good 7 years away.

Nice, a bevy of good links. Reminds me why I like Qt3 so much.

Thank you…I thought I was the only one that wasn’t totally impressed by Thing 82. Actually, I agreed with the things Tom liked in the podcast, like the style of the camera and I loved the dog (best actor across both films). But I just couldn’t build up any suspension of disbelief. The things people are so casually explaining away here I just couldn’t get past.

Why was the alien so brilliant that it could pilot a spacecraft but couldn’t communicate or even use tools or weapons? If it was so powerful and wanted to kill everything, how come it took so long to wipe out a bunch of half-drunk idiots?

It was interesting to read some of the interpretations here that perhaps the alien was not the owner of the ship but actually a prisoner or cargo…that could explain some things. But in general, for something so intelligent, I wasn’t convinced it was behaving intelligently. Why hide? If it wants to kill everything, it was powerful enough to do it.

Interesting too is the discussion over the parasitic form; are the hosts aware they are infected or not? They don’t seem to be for the most part, but Blair was certainly going about his business at the end there (perhaps locked away his invaders had more time to incubate?). His building of an underground complex, a vehicle, and a perfectly clean-cut trap door in the bottom of Mac’s shack indicate an awfully sentient, aware, and pretty handy being. That was actually the part that lost the movie for me; I just couldn’t believe that in a couple days all that could have been accomplished, especially from something as clumsy as Wilford Brimley (and if it changed into the lobster or dog or toothy forms to do its work, well, those things were even clumsier and featured less intelligent behavior). Let’s say it could do all those things…anything that smart and competent shouldn’t have had so much trouble dispatching a bunch of goofball humans.

I know there are a lot of believers here, and Thing 82 isn’t without some neat moments and suspense, but I thought Alien was scarier, Leviathan was grosser, and Carpenter’s other alien film, The Starman, funnier and more meaningful. If it helps, though, I found Avatar to be way crappier.

i loved and was totally impressed by the thing '82 when i saw it ~2000. i just listed the plot holes when telefrog mentioned he couldn’t think of any.

Maybe the “thing” is the reason the alien saucer crashed. It might not have been the owner. Perhaps it was a parasite to them as well.

Of course in the original story, it was a three-eyed bug-eye-monster that could read minds too (that’s how it read your mind before it assumed your identity.) Let’s say this version of the thing actually absorbs and integrates memories as it absorbs new people. It might have memories of the alien crew, who know how to build their UFO stuff inside it. I dunno… it was a movie. If you try to explain everything, there’s no movie.