— RANKING: 30 —
THE GREATEST OF ALL SCI-FI REMAKES: Many genre aficionados believe that John Carpenter’s version of the well-regarded novella Who Goes There? rates as greater even than the Howard Hawks–produced 1950s version. Here, T. K. Carter, Kurt Russell, and Donald Moffat prepare to face whatever is “out there.” Courtesy: Universal.
CREDITS
Universal Pictures, Turman-Foster Company; John Carpenter, dir.; John W. Campbell Jr., short story; Bill Lancaster, scr.; David Foster, Wilbur Stark, Lawrence Turman, pro.; Ennio Morricone, mus.; Dean Cundey, cin.; Todd C. Ramsay, ed.; John J. Lloyd, prod. design; Henry Larrecq, art dir.; Lance Anderson, Rob Bottin, Stan Winston, special makeup effects; Roy Arbogast, F/X; Jim Aupperle, animation effects; 109 min.; Color; 2.20:1.
CAST
Kurt Russell (R. J. MacReady); Wilford Brimley (Dr. Blair); T. K. Carter (Nauls); David Clennon (Palmer); Keith David (Childs); Richard Dysart (Dr. Copper); Charles Hallahan (Vance Norris); Peter Maloney (George Bennings); Richard Masur (Clark); Donald Moffat (Garry); Joel Polis (Fuchs); Thomas G. Waites (Windows); Norbert Weisser (Norwegian).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
I don’t know who to trust.
BLAIR TO MACREADY
BACKGROUND
New Jersey–born John W. Campbell Jr. (1910–1971) became a popular writer of the sort of space fantasies he had devoured as a child, when Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were still riding high. During his editorship of Astounding Science-Fiction magazine (later Analog), Campbell oversaw the creation of a more realistic form for the era of atomic energy and UFO sightings. To distinguish such stories from his earlier work, Campbell created the pen name “Don A. Stuart.” His most highly regarded piece was the novella Who Goes There? (1938). When Howard Hawks optioned it for The Thing from Another World (1951), a film that would capitalize on the postwar fascination with flying saucers, the state of the art of F/X was not sufficient to visualize the transference of an alien’s inner being from one earthling to another. After high-tech, big-budget science fiction became popular following the success of Star Wars, a true-to-the-original remake struck John Carpenter as logical.
THE PLOT
On what first seems a normal day, members of U.S. National Science Institute Station #4 in Antarctica begin their chores. Suddenly, a malamute rushes into their outpost, pursued overhead by a helicopter full of Norwegians, who fire down on the dog. The Norwegians are killed by accident, and the American crew adopts the dog. Gradually, MacReady, a natural leader, grasps that the Norwegians had unearthed a UFO with an alien being on board. The alien can merge with any animate object and assume the identity of man or beast . . . including the canine that may not turn out to be, in its current guise, man’s best friend.
THE FILM
John Carpenter was among the so-called Movie Brats who rose to prominence in the mid-1970s. Their numbers include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, and John Landis. Essentially, they set out to recreate the old (and now nonexistent) Hollywood product that they loved as youths by endowing such breezy entertainments with a modernist edge. In particular, Carpenter was enamored of the films of Howard Hawks. His first low-budget feature, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), reset Hawks’s Western Rio Bravo (1959) in a contemporary urban situation. Naturally, when the opportunity to remake the Hawks-produced classic, The Thing from Another World (1951), came along, Carpenter jumped at the chance. However, despite his close identification with both horror (Halloween, 1978) and sci-fi (Escape from New York, 1981), Carpenter continued to claim that he most loved the Western. To acknowledge this, he had Kurt Russell wear a sombrero throughout the film.
The Thing was among the breakthrough films in the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy genres, introducing what would come to be called “gross-out/splatter” F/X in which the innards of living creatures, real and imagined, come spilling out. Such a stomach-churning process was largely invented by Rob Bottin (1959–), who had previously contributed to the creature work for the Star Wars cantina sequence and the transformations in The Howling (Joe Dante, 1981). Before that film, a stop-motion process dating back to Universal’s 1940s Wolfman features had been employed. Bottin became so exhausted by his endless work attempts to create perfection as to believability that old pro Stan Winston was recruited to help with F/X for the dog cage sequence in The Thing.
THEME
However indebted to Hawks, Carpenter’s film reverses the ideology of the original movie. In that Cold War parable, the allies, though lackadaisical before the arrival of the carrot-like (therefore “Red”) creature, transform into a tight group, able to fight the intruder through loyalty. In Carpenter’s version, the opposite occurs: the loose community dissipates the moment that team members realize that the “thing” could be any one of them. The only way to survive is through a reliance on rugged individualism, which may be intended as a commentary on the Reagan era. The ending is ambiguous, with MacReady and Childs facing off, each wary that the other may harbor the parasite. It’s possible that the threat has not been destroyed. If so, the arrival of an expected rescue team would introduce the apocalypse that would shortly end the world.
TRIVIA
One major bone of contention during script meetings was whether to include a female team member. In old Hollywood, the inclusion of women in the cast contributed glamour, which was considered essential for box-office appeal. In more recent films, the woman would be not only beautiful but also strong and smart, as with post-feminist heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien. Concluding that the addition of a woman crewmember would cause their film to resemble Ridley Scott’s hit too closely, the filmmakers decided against it. However, they did choose Carpenter’s then-wife, Adrienne Barbeau, for the voice of the computer.