I did go see this movie drunk with my buddy opening night….he told me that I enjoyed myself so much that I was louder than the group of black girls behind us. So Saturday morning I took some advil, drank some soda, and went to the morning matinee.
THE THING 2011 is recounts the events that happened at the Norwegian compound right before John Carpenter’s movie in 1982. The movie starts off with three Norwegians in a snow cat trying to home in on the source of a mysterious radio signal…..a little reminiscent of Alien if you ask me. They find an alien spacecraft and an alien, and now have to call in the most attractive paleontologist they can find ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead….Kate Lloyd) to dig it safely out of the ice. They succeed in both, they get the thing back to the compound, it thaws out, and all kinds of gory clichés and plagiarism ensue.
Now that may have sounded cynical but I definitely think the movie is worth seeing. I hear a lot people saying that this movie lacked on real scares and relied more on gore. Well there was definitely more than a few times that I was genuinely jolted….not to be mistaken with disgusted. Yeah sure they were all cheap scares and not substantive terror but I really don’t even know if that’s possible in a movie anymore. The movie had some minor inventiveness, especially when it came to figuring out who was human and who wasn’t, and I appreciated that. But it also shamelessly tore from the pages of other sci-fi/horror movies such as ALIENS and a slew of David Cronenberg films. Mary Elizabeth Winstead gave a so-so performance as the Ellen Ripley like strong female lead and that pretty much can be said for everybody else in the movie except for Jørgen Langhelle who played Lars, the one character in the movie who couldn’t speak any english. I had a soft spot for him while I watched this movie, especially when he had a very vulnerable moment showing Kate Lloyd where the grenades were hidden. You get to see some more of the inside of the alien craft although nothing really interesting except for some holographic legos. The climax of the movie makes you scratch your head saying if the alien could do that now, why didn’t it just do that when it crashed. After that, it ends on a flat note and leaves you wondering what happens to Kate Lloyd….perhaps another movie, bring it on!
Since I didn’t see this movie drunk and remember it I can’t use the empty bottle rating system but I can say that I give it a traditional B-.
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