Hollywood Grind: THE THING and Lessons From Fantastic Fest

At last month's Fantastic Fest, I wached 31 movies I'd never seen before, all of them made independently, none of them produced in Hollywood. Emerging from that semi-delirious genre haze back into the world of wide releases this month has been instructive, and contains some lessons for Hollywood as well.

True, I've only seen four studio releases (The Ides of March, Real Steel, The Thing, Johnny English Reborn) so far -- I missed press screenings for Footlose and The Big Year, and couldn't bring myself to pay money to see them, even for the purposes of this column -- but I've also caught a couple of independents (The Way, Take Shelter) as a reminder of the type of films that receive limited releases in the U.S.

The Thing is probably the most fascinating. As beloved as John Carpenter's 1982 version has become, it was neither a critical nor financial success at the time of its release. Over time, it built a cult audience, inspired various spin-offs, and established good name recognition. (Yesterday, I overhead a multiplex patron who, seeing the poster for the new movie, commented, "How many of those are they going to make?")

When plans for a prequel were announced in January 2009, the news was met with the usual mumbling and grumbling, mine among them. My complaint, as expressed in an article for Cinematical, was that the project was said to borrow heavily "from the John W. Campbell Jr. short story 'Who Goes There,' the basis of the [John] Carpenter film and 1951 Howard Hawks original The Thing From Another World. It is set in a Norwegian camp and chronicles how the shape-shifting alien was first discovered and overcame the inhabitants of that camp." As I detailed, and as readers of the original story already knew: There was no Norwegian camp in Campbell's original story. It was added for Carpenter's version, as scripted by Bill Lancaster. If you're going to pay lip service to the source material, at the very least you should have read it in advance. (To be fair, that may have been the spin provided by Variety; their article is now behind a paywall.)

Ronald Moore (Battlestar Galactica) was listed as the writer at the time. Just two months later, a new writer, Eric Heisserer, came on board to do a fresh, "from scratch" rewrite, news that Bloody Disgusting broke; Heisserer said at the time: "We are all so much in love with Carpenter's film, so protective of it, we're doing all we can to avoid stepping on its toes. I jumped at this job because I hold the Carpenter adaptation to very high standards, and I knew it would be a challenge to create a comparable companion piece. Sort of a 'Nobody better screw this up, especially me' mentality."

Heisserer had also done a "from scratch' rewrite for the A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, ultimately sharing credit with Wesley Strick, and later did the script for Final Destination 5.

More than a year later, our own Todd Brown commented positively about the casting news. Not only were good, strong actors cast in the lead roles, in Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton, but the project also cared enough to get "real, actual Norwegians" -- and good actors, to boot -- to play the Norwegians. The original motive may have been simply a desire by Universal to make use of its back library, yet there's little doubt that the filmmakers wanted to add their own imprint on a reworked classic.

Aye, and there's the rub. Without blowing Heisserer's words out of proportion, the desire to "avoid stepping" on the toes of Carpenter's version, the challenge of creating "a comparable companion piece," and the fear of 'screwing it up,' may have intimidated the filmmakers more than they consciously realized.

I've already expressed my generally negative views on the film, so I won't revisit them here. Suffice it to say that I think the filmmkers might have been better served if they had been less respectful of Carpenter's version, either by fully embracing the jocular action movie they seem to have been striving for initially, or by going in another direction entirely. The notion of a faithful prequel seems to have limited the story possibilities inherent in the material. Winstead and Edgerton do the best they can, but the characters aren't strong enough to make up for the film's liabilities.

True enough, there are defenders of the film (see the comments in response to my review.) To the credit of the producers and the financiers, they didn't cave in and make the leads teenagers who somehow find themselves in the Antartic partying like it's 1999, and they kept the gorier elements to retain the R-rating, rather than soften things up to grab a more family-friendly PG-13.

Yet, going back to the films I saw at Fantastic Fest, the best burned brightly with the fire of their creators; it's that creative vision, whether it's disturbing and piercing (Bullhead), perversely funny (Clown), warmly touching (A Boy and His Samurai), strangely suspenseful (Sleep Tight), or idiosyncratically haunting (The Devil's Business), that draws interest and sparks discussion. Even the films that were less successful were worth the time and attention to watch and write about them, because they're not products of "group speak" or reactions to marketing possibilities, they're deeply-felt reflections of one or two people, working in colloboration with talented actors and crew members.

The Thing feels like it was made to satisfy as many constituents as possible, a strategy that did not pay off either critically or financially. (Oddly enough, Box Office Mojo points out that the 2011 version sold as many tickets as the 1982 version in their respective opening weekends.) There is no overriding creative vision; it's only been four days since I saw it, and it's fading from memory quickly.

From the finished film, it's hard to really see what the filmmakers wanted to accomplish, other than not screwing it up. That's not "fantastic," that's a shame.