Leeds International Film festival: The Thing

Last week Team Hebe, and some friends went along to the UK premier of The Thing which was screened at the Leeds International Film Festival. As regular cinema goers we were very happy to see this film a month early as we had talked about it a lot when we saw the trailer a few weeks ago. We were also the sponsor of the film, so we had a little shout out before it started.

Director: Matthijs Van Heijningen Jr.

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton and Ulrich Thomsen

Just to confirm, this film is a prequel to the original John Carpenter's The Thing(1982), NOT a remake. The name obviously confuses people but I love the fact it’s almost a remake but yet it’s not. It works really well that the film can copy the formula of the original yet be a different story, in this way, the characters do not have to be overly compared to Kurt Russell and his crew.

Plot

The story revolves around a group of scientists sent to Antarctica to look at a ‘discovery’ out there. Kate Lloyd (Die Hard’s daughter, Mary Elizabeth Winstead), her crew and some Norweigen scientists realise the discovery is not only an alien life form but one that can replicate human DNA and ‘become’ one of them. As they struggle to work out who is themselves and who is not, they are picked off one by one by The Thing.

The Good

The suspense is bang on. I literally jumped in my seat more than once. Then once the action kicks in, the gore is amazing. I normally don’t like gore, but this was gore/science so it was interesting as well as stomach churning. I heard people behind me laughing, not because it was stupid, but because it was so intense at certain points in the film. A couple of the scenes brought back strong memories of the first film in great way. It was so similar to the original, yet different and new. I must point out that in today’s horror film market, this is a cut above the rest. Remakes such as Nightmare On Elm Street and John Carpenter's The Fog do not do justice to the originals but this makes a better stab at it and Winstead shows she is good actress without compromising her self-respect.

The Bad

The only things that could have been improved were the characters and their relationships, I would have liked for the characters to have been more defined, and maybe slightly more interesting. Maybe that’s a bit cliché but the only characters that really stood out to me were Kate Lloyd and LLars(Jørgen Langhelle) but that is me just nitpicking, maybe putting the characters into certain brackets would have made the film more predictable.

In the original film the characters were so engrossing and you actually cared about each of them in some way. This is one of the main differences between the two films.

Rating

8/10 in comparison to todays horror flicks, 7/10 overall