The 2011 prequel The Thing was not exactly well received by fans of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi/horror classic. While it did its best to recreate many of the things we’d seen in Carpenter’s vision, it eschewed practical FX for CGI that just looked…bad. Furthermore, the reviews for the film weren’t exactly kind. Many felt that it was too much of an imitation (no pun intended) of Carpenter’s remake, ultimately unwilling to take its own risks.
Writer Eric Heisserer took to Twitter to clear the air on several topics that came up as well as talking about his view of where things went wrong, how he was constrained by the events that took place in Carpenter’s script, and how he wanted to set the mood from the very beginning. It’s a fascinating dive into how a writer envisions a movie and how that vision gets distorted and altered the moment the scriptwriter is done and turns in the final draft.
The Thing held such deep promise. As I haven’t seen it since it came out, I’m not going to try and say that it failed miserably. However, as the film is only a few years old and I’ve already forgotten pretty much everything about it, that doesn’t speak too well to its impact.
