John Carpenter's The Thing - John Carpenter (1982)

Although not entirely accurate, John Carpenter's cinema remembers him as the most prolific and inventive filmmaker in the horror and science fiction genres, with his works from the '70s and '80s (such as The Fog, Tales from the Crypt, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, and Christine) rightfully retained. On the one hand, this is because the messages of a different nature contained in his works (which are always present) are easily lost in the suspenseful plots. On the other hand, it's because when the author approached a different genre, it was already too late, as the audience refused to see him in any other way.

The Thing belongs to Carpenter's early period, being the first film financed and produced by a major studio (Universal), offering a bold adaptation of a famous novella (John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?) with a generous budget of 15 million USD, and a decent cast.

Some timid markers still indicate the presence of the artist's experimental phase, and the fact that the film suffered serious mistreatment in post-production is due to this indecisiveness, coupled with the convulsive stress of fear of disappointment and self-doubt.

It's hard to say how much of the film belongs to horror and how much to science fiction, but if you get stuck in the surface dilemma, you miss the most important dimension of the script - a philosophical, delicate, and subtly inserted one that you only realize after the projection is over.

According to Carpenter, The Thing is the first part of the "Apocalypse Trilogy," which also includes the subsequent productions "Prince of Darkness" and "In the Mouth of Madness," all of them very different from each other, but with a common denominator: the violent and abrupt end of humanity. In The Thing, this could happen through the accidental arrival on Earth of a hostile life form, hard to define (the thing), with highly developed mimetic properties that allow it to substitute for anyone (and any being) in a process that does not allow the replica to realize its new identity. The valuable metaphor leads directly to one of the reference ontological questions: Who am I? with speculative variations: Is there a danger in me for my fellow humans? Am I the one who knows myself, or the one I have learned to believe I am? Am I inhabited by an entity that uses me to achieve a goal, which I was convinced was mine? Or is the alternative comfort of the idea that someone else is responsible for the excesses, constraints, mistakes, injustices, and imposture that we repeat so often?

All these genre-related doubts forcefully invade the viewer (just as the thing gradually takes over the members of the Arctic mission), nestle in their soul, and begin to play with their mind long after the viewing, subjecting them to complex and profound existential rhetoric.

The fact that things work out this way and not otherwise is proven by the upward evolution of the critiques, which in just a few years has gone from harsh accusations and acidic reviews to widespread and substantive appreciation, propelling the film to a stable position among the top 15 sci-fi rankings of all time.

Because beyond the philosophical note, we have here a film that was worked on exhaustively (just for the special effects, around 40 people worked tirelessly for about three months, and "only" 50 technicians were involved in the final scene). Refrigerated sets were needed at 4°C (to recreate the weather conditions) and an Arctic base had to be built on location in Stewart, British Columbia, where there were already destroyed American facilities from an explosion (the ruins were used in filming), and where filming took place in freezing temperatures of -26°C.

If we compare the extraordinary effort invested in the production with the seeming casualness with which the screenplay is treated, we can easily understand the reasons why some criticized "The Thing" for having inconsistent characters or implausible motivations, and for a narrative that does not elegantly connect its acts, but rather focuses on shock value.

Even so, this film must be approached and understood as it was intended, armed with the information provided here, with careful attention and equal good faith...