Hawks' 1951 original exalted human interaction versus the intergalactic vegetable; John Carpenter's version, closer to the John W. Campbell, Jr. story, is a full-on Sartrean descent, marinated in grue. The setting is the scientific station, the Antarctic winter providing the isolation for the dissolving of the all-male group; the sole female voice belongs to a computer game, so the main intruding force here is The Thing, an alien shape-shifter whose space vessel crashed into the ice millenniums ago. The creature, first spotted morphed as a dog, infiltrates the base, laid out by Carpenter calmly, masterfully -- a tracking shot follows the husky through the corridors, "Superstition" plays in the distance, the first victim's shadow is projected on the wall as the animal enters the room, fade out. Kurt Russell visits a neighboring Norwegian camp, left smoking after the alien's departure, for the first glimpses of the horrors, layers of churning, grimacing flesh devised by Rob Bottin with links to Bacon, Munch, and the Surrealists. Wilford Brimley contemplates the virulent spread through the crew, and later, locked up after trying to isolate the body-jumping invader from the outside world, murmurs, "I don't know who to trust." Peter Maloney is first housing the organism, crouched by the snow with a pair of monstrous hands and a roar before the flames consume him; Richard Dysart's limbs are devoured by the torso of Charles Hallahan, whose head then comes unglued and sprouts arachnoid legs. Endless white for the day and pitiless, dark blues at dusk, red-purplish flares often added, all in the most compressed of frames; Dean Cundey's cinematography keeps deep focus, but Carpenter's depth of field only heightens paranoia, claustrophobia, and the dread-awe of penetrating menace. Tentacles and slime spurt, even blood leaps and hisses to the touch -- "I'm human," Russell can only attempt to assert as his nerves crumble around possible humanoid replicas, the it-walks-among-us '50s sci-fi scenario cannily updated to the '80s contagious mistrust. Hawks imagines the end of the hellish circle; Carpenter's reluctant heroes sit in the void, fatigued, waiting for the encroaching cold and darkness. With Keith David, David Clennon, T.K. Carter, Joel Polis, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, and Thomas Waites.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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