OGWiseman Watch-Blogs!
Watching John Carpenter's "The Thing" for the first time, 39 years after its release.
8:48 PM (all times PM) - I’m about to start watching “The Thing”, a John Carpenter movie from 1982 starring Kurt Russell that apparently tanked because (I just read) it came out two weeks after “E.T.” and the movie business is mostly about having enough luck to stay out of Steven Spielberg’s way.
(I like this poster although this movie isn’t about psychic powers or psychedelic drugs or light shining from people’s heads so I also don’t really get it.)
I know almost nothing about this movie, but one thing I want to do vis-a-vis this newsletter project is fill out my own knowledge of sci fi, so I looked on some “Top 100" Sci Fi Movies” list and this was the highest-ranked one (#12) I hadn’t seen. So hopefully it’ll be good! I assume there’s an alien, unless the tag line is a serious misdirect.
8:55 - Movie immediately dates itself: The shape-shifting alien has taken the form of a dog, they are hunting the dog in the opening scene, and apparently they’re going to kill a bunch of dogs in this movie. Would NEVER happen today, in no small part because Steven Spielberg was about to prove it was a lot more profitable to have your star be *nice* to the cutest thing on screen. Imagine E.T. if the beefcake dad went out with a shotgun and a flamethrower the second his kid heard something moving behind the trash cans.
8:59 - You’re telling me Kurt Russell used to look like *this*? My goodness, you could get hypothermia falling into his eyes but save yourself by toweling off with his majestic mane. No wonder this guy became a star!
(Kurt, of course, plays a blue-collar helicopter pilot living year-round on an Antarctic research base, which is apparently amazing for your hair.)
9:07 - The beauty of old movies—they don’t waste time. There’s a crew of blue-collar guys doing unspecified work on a research base in Antarctica. They don’t have families, or sob stories, or anything else. They have competence and bravery and humor, and those are considered enough. Nobody is writing a letter to someone who won’t get the surgery they need if the guy doesn’t come home—they just don’t want to die because they want to live!
9:09 - Hmm… I think I’m starting to see why this film may not have captured the popular imagination in quite the way Steve’s cloying alien masterpiece was about to.
(When Kurt Russell is not filling the screen, this movie can be a little hard to look at. It’s possible the alien corpse has the most charisma here.)
9:15 - This movie definitely suffers from some of the “why-didn’t-they-try-x” and “But-would-y-really-happen” moments that even good movies did back then. Sort of a sci fi analogy for why “John America, total badass” has a thick Austrian accent in Arnold’s movies from this decade. Hopefully Carpenter directs his way past this and we get to some other dynamic.
9:20 - None of these other actors should have agreed to appear on screen with a young Kurt Russell.
(“Have you seen Kurt’s goddamn hair? No, I refuse to compete. My character is an Antarctic hobo, deal with it. THIS IS MY PROCESS.”)
(I mean, come on. Just make the movie a one-shot on Kurt and let the other guys shout their lines from off-screen.
9:23 - I googled alternate posters and THIS is the poster, right here. Kurt with a flamethrower, not anonymous dude with light shooting out his face. Put the money on the screen and the poster, don’t overthink it.
(This makes me patriotic and it doesn’t even have anything to do with America.)
9:34 - The genius of John Carpenter is his simplicity. They’re hunting a dog, and when they catch it, it turns out to be something else that hunts them instead. They think the alien is dead, and it turns out to not be dead but is now among them. These things seem obvious, but they’re not. It’s much, much easier to reach for something more complicated and esoteric, but what’s really frightening and suspenseful is the unstoppable operation of a very simple mechanism that everyone can understand.
9:42 - Okay, here we go, after a couple of kind of dumb scenes, we come to it—The alien can take people’s identities by being alone with them and then can shapeshift into the person perfectly and undetectably. And the problem there is that it might already have done it to one or more of them, so they’re all in a room trying to figure out who it might be and—as with all good sci fi—it becomes about what the monster reveals about them, not merely what they do to fight it.
We certainly know this movie will end with Kurt Russell fighting the alien one-on-one, but THIS is the scene we’ll really remember: Who can you trust, and how?
9:50 - There are black people besides Keith David in this movie, but they’re, uh, problematic. Like they’re literally off-screen a bunch while the white people (and Keith David, to be fair) are talking and one of them is literally the cook. The way this movie is cast would just be totally different today—racially, gender-wise, attractiveness and charisma, you name it.
(“By the time Black Panther comes out, we’re gonna be too old for this shit.”)
9:55 - They manage to get Kurt Russell’s mug on screen so much we’re literally looking at him while the alien is sneaking up on him.
(“Pull in tight enough to cut all the other humans out, but not so close we can’t see him brood.”)
9:56 - This research station in Antarctica is like freaking giant. They’re exploring a new part of it for the 5th/6th time in the movie and they’re like underground. Did they dig in the permafrost? Maybe this is why “Friends” thought they could get away with the size of the apartment?
10:00 - Even if this guy hasn’t been taken over by *this* alien, I’m putting even money up that he’s some kind of alien.
(“Is it too late to rewrite the script so I’m wearing a mask the entire time?" How about just while I’m on screen with Kurt?”)
10:10 PM - More scenes of these blue-collar dudes bouncing off each other and trying to figure out who’s the alien. This is the best part of the movie. These actors don’t pop on screen but they can all act, and Carpenter is smart enough to give them real scenes to chew on. 4-5 minutes at a time of escalating arguments that build up to real change in the situation, including violence. *Now* I care.
10:13 - Okay, now they’re back out after the escaped-again alien, and of course Kurt Russell has a plan. They’ll take the copious amounts of dynamite that are apparently just laying around on this Antarctic base (?) and do something that’s not totally explained with it, and that will kill the alien… somehow. It’s not crystal clear how this is supposed to work.
10:18 - Great, classic-Carpenter twist: The alien had been frozen in the ice for millennia, woken up by some very naughty Norwegian researchers, and now, trapped by Kurt Russell’s cleverness and seeing that it has no current way to escape Antarctica, it decides to re-freeze itself to await better conditions—and take the humans with it, killing them. Kurt’s plan worked perfectly… and totally backfired. So perfectly simple.
10:21 - So now they have “no choice” but to burn the place down around their own ears, killing themselves and the alien at the same time. It’s beautiful in its naïveté. This is why these men don’t need families to justify our investment in them. This movie takes place in a world where the obligation of a certain kind of man (mostly white but not always, never a woman for literally decades to come, still never a gay or trans person) to protect all of humanity just didn’t feel any need to explain itself. The notion of the honorable sacrifice was the main axle of the cultural vanguard.
Hollywood has always been fundamentally conservative, in a thematic and psychological though not a political sense.
10:25 - This has been quite a good movie, despite an ending that borderline sucks. There’s no real “how” to any of it, stuff just blows up and then we see Kurt Russell step out of some shadow and know he got away. It’s fine. But it’s not much more than fine. #12 on the all time lists feels like a serious overrate to me at this point. Seminal and influential? Sure. But this movie has been done a lot better and with better effects besides.
10:33 - Not much more to write: They try a little twist at the end and it was probably clever for the time but not now. The best part of this movie was the second act stuff where someone was an alien and they didn’t know who—human drama is always the interesting part.
10:34 - Well, and this of course:
(“Should we add a female character to this movie and give a talented female actress a chance to hang with the boys and maybe do something interesting with it?”
“Shit no, put a drawing on the wall of a chick getting a boner, then have Kurt stand in front of it and polish his flamethrower. They’ll get the point.”)
A rollercoaster ride of “I want to see this movie”, “No I don’t want to,see this movie”. 🤣🤪🎬