Anybody pumped for "The Thing 2011"?

ebow86

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John Carpenters 1982 classic "The Thing" is my favorite movie of all time. This film just delivers on so many levels, fear, terror, claustrophobia, paranoia, overwhelming soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and a little dark humor thrown in for good measure. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend seeing it right away.

Some of you might know that there is a prequel coming out later this year that basically shows the events of what happened before the first movie. As pumped and excited as I am for this film, there's a small part of me that has to not get my hopes up too high. The guy directing this http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0374048/ is essentially making his directing debut, and although he is the son of a famous director, the guy really doesn't have any experience. I can only hope that the movie lives up to the standards that I have set, and I hope that it stays true to the original, and doesn't get too "Hollywood" in it's attempt to scare if you know what I mean.
 

cuervoblur

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What made the first one so good, besides Kurt Russel playing Snake Plissken at the north pole, was the lack of CGI special effects. When the thing comes out of that dog all spider legged and jumps away, I think that scared the crap out of me when I saw it the first time on VHS back in the day. The whole movie looked dark and dirty.

I hope they don't go all George Lucas Special Editions on us and fill every frame with effects. So it takes away that gritty atmosphere. I'll keep my hopes low.
 

Lite_me

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I've seen sooo many movies in my time. But only a few have always 'stuck' in my mind. This was one of them. Loved it! Another that quickly comes to mind was Quest For Fire. Here's hoping the new "Thing" is a worthy sequel to the original.
 

richpalm

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CGI gets to be too much when the whole movie is nothing but. Give me old movies any day!

I just watched the original King Kong. (1931) Unprecedented for its time with the stop-motion effects.

Rich
 

angelofwar

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"The Thing"...Ahhh...awesome flick! I cleaned out my collection a few years ago, and this was one of the one's I kept. Anytime I feel like getting away, or being lost, this movie will do it...you feel like your there in the compound, away from civilization...and cause you can relate to the character, you know everything's safe....always warm...whether the bottle of JB, the weapons, the fires...then the freezing cold...the constant back and forth kept it real. I don't get my hopes up about movies anymore...I just get lucky with a good oneevery-now and then.
 

EZO

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The Thing is a great film..... a classic. As we all know, prequels and sequels can be a fantastic revisit to the original storyline or leave us disappointed and pissed off. This path can be even more precarious when you are trying to revive a "classic". Let's hope for the best.

Sometimes a completely unknown director doing his first feature length film can be incredibly exciting and refreshing. Neill Blomkamp with his Academy Award for Best Picture nominated District 9 comes to mind as a member of this club. Duncan Jones is in this club too. Perhaps Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. will get to join.

People who are not movie buffs or not quite old enough may not know that John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982) was a remake of the film "The Thing - From another World" (1951) which was itself an adaptation of the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" by the important science fiction author and editor John W. Campbell that ran in the pulp magazine Astounding Stories. John W. Campbell is regarded as the single most influential figure in what is known as the Golden Age of (literary) Science Fiction in the 1940s.

I totally loved the 1951 version as a kid and watched it many times on TV. It is credited with being the first "alien invasion" film and a classic of the early sci-fi films of the era.

Both films involve a similar story line about a research team in the Arctic but the John Carpenter version in 1982 more closely follows the original novella. The 1951 version features James Arness of Gunsmoke fame as the Thing who is essentially a vicious humanoid alien vegetable.

The story line from the 1951 film goes, "Scientists at an Arctic research station discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. Upon closer examination, they discover the frozen pilot. All hell breaks loose when they take him back to their station and he is accidentally thawed out!"

thing.jpg


Hey, speaking of prequels is anybody else pumped about the soon to be released, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"?. Andy Serkis who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings and King Kong in the Peter Jackson version of the film plays the ape Caesar in the new prequel with special effects by WETA Digital. James Franco and John Lithgow also star in the film. These credentials make it look like it has great potential but once again it's another attempt to revive a classic franchise and so lets hope it's worth the price of admission.
 
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Quest4fire

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I totally loved the 1951 version as a kid and watched it many times on TV. It is credited with being the first "alien invasion" film and a classic of the early sci-fi films of the era.
Likewise! "Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!"

John Carpenter's version of "The Thing", however, is legendary to me because, to this day I can't casually watch it. It has all the elements of a classic scare fest! It draws me right in every time, disbelief is suspended and I feel like I am right there! I can't say that about many movies. I will probably check out the re-make but it will be tough to measure up to it's predecessors!
 

EZO

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"Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!"

That's right!! I almost forgot about that classic line. And it was not too long after the original Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting in 1947 after which the phenomenon really began to take off in reality and in popular culture.

You are right, even though the two films are derived from the same source material they can hardly be compared. The 1982 version is in a league of its own compared to the 1951 version. As I mentioned in my earlier post the Carpenter film is really much closer to the original novella which in 1973, was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written.

Hey guys, John Carpenter's version of "The Thing" aside, if anyone should have an interest in watching the entire 1951 version of "The Thing From Another World" it is available online for free HERE.

BTW, James Arness, the actor who played the Thing in the 1951 classic and older brother of Peter Graves who starred in the TV series Mission Impossible passed away June 3, 2011.
 
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EZO

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Funny timing the but first full trailer for The Thing 2011 was released just today (7/14). I sincerely hope the actual film has something more to offer 'cause the trailer doesn't come across as anything terribly original. It kinda' feels like I've seen this movie before.

 
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texsun

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After viewing the trailer it looks as if it's not a prequel but a remake of the 1982 film.
 

ebow86

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"We got to it before it had time to change"- wilford brimley

"Change to what?"-Nauls

"Diabeeeeetus"-wilford brimley
 

cuervoblur

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"We got to it before it had time to change"- wilford brimley

"Change to what?"-Nauls

"Diabeeeeetus"-wilford brimley

Oh that gets a +1 for the LOL

I saw the trailer this AM as well, they really need to define Prequel a little better. It totally looks like a remake. Prequel would show me the crash of the alien and all the hilarity that ensues after up until the first few frames of the Kurt Russel movie.
 

EZO

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Many interesting details about the making of the prequel and what we might expect are revealed in this Wikipedia entry.

So, it turns out that the story takes place three days before the events of the Carpenter film. The producers seem to express an appreciation for respecting the integrity of the original source material and the screen writer apparently took a very detailed look at little details of the Carpenter version for hints about what happened to the Norwegians that were only implied in the previous film. While one thing we have learned is that Universal Studios has absolutely no idea how to make a good trailer to promote this as a prequel, there is still hope!

"After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they found remaking Carpenter's film would be like "paint(ing) a mustache on the Mona Lisa" Eric Newman explained; "I'd be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone remake The Exorcist... And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It's a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It's the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter's movie - they're already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible."

The screen writer Eric Heisserer says,

"It's a really fascinating way to construct a story because we're doing it by autopsy, by examining very, very closely everything we know about the Norwegian camp and about the events that happened there from photos and video footage that's recovered, from a visit to the base, the director, producer and I have gone through it countless times marking, you know, there's a fire axe in the door, we have to account for that…were having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us 'cause it all has to make sense." — Eric Heisserer describing the process of creating a script that is consistent with the first film.

Image Engine, the effects house that worked on Neill Blomkamp's District 9 created the special effects for this film and the film employs advanced animatronics techniques not available in 1982 that are enhanced by CGI, rather the CGI alone. Apparently, the interior of the alien ship is explored in much greater detail with a lot of thought into what the interior of a non-humanoid designed space would be like. The director acknowledges inspiration from the film Alien and apparently the character of Ripley led to the decision to cast a female lead. And it seems the director actually read the 1938 novella by John Campbell and has incorporated many aspects of the original story into the prequel.

OK, yesterday after seeing the trailer I wasn't too excited about this film but now that I've read the Wikipedia article I'm "pumped"!
 
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Chicago X

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One of the first movie's visceral horror scenes,indelibly etched in my teenage mind, was one of salvation gone wrong:

Resuscitation of one of the characters is attempted with an old-school defib unit....the customary "CLEAR" is not followed by a click and a spasm, but rather by the opening of a bloody bear-trap, fashioned out of the victim's ribs and sternum. Instant amputation occurs as the chest trap slams shut, taking the rescuer's hands with it.

The scene with the disembodied head growing spider legs and crawling off is pretty creepy too.....
 
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ebow86

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In my opinion, what really takes the horror of this movie up a big step is that absolutley gripping score by Ennio Morricone. It maybe the best score used in a horror film I've ever heard. Bum bum...bum bum...bum bum...it never gets old.

For me one of the scarriest moments is actually one of the most unlikley for most viewers of the film, it's where Fuchs is writing on that desk, the lights go out, and the moment he's walking towards the door with that candle and "the thing" barrels past him in the dark, that's kind of creepy.
 

Satanta

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Best line in the Carpenter movie: "You gotta be effin' kidding me."

Still waiting for Red Dawn remake, the planet of the Apes pre-Q and now another Mad Max movie is coming out as well. :)
 

EZO

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In my opinion, what really takes the horror of this movie up a big step is that absolutley gripping score by Ennio Morricone. It maybe the best score used in a horror film I've ever heard. Bum bum...bum bum...bum bum...it never gets old.

I would tend to agree with you (although there could be some argument about the scores of certain other horror films) but what they will do with the new version of this film remains to be seen. According to the aforementioned Wikipedia article, The original Ennio Morricone score will likely be reflected in this film's score, but Morricone will not score the film, nor will his music from the '82 version be used." I mean, Morricone is 82 years old now, yet is his music has been behind some of the most iconic films and most memorable scores of the last half of the twentieth century, like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for instance.
 

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I didn't even know about the new movie until I saw this thread, and after reading all the posts in the thread, I can honestly say I am pumped about the new movie. I just hope they do a good job with it, and it kinda sounds like they will.

 

Cataract

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I remember first seeing part of the 1982 version playing on pay TV at noon, while we where waiting for lunch to be ready. Obviously, we had to catch the part where the guy's head falls off and turns into a spider. No one was hungry that day and there were plenty of left overs, but I did want to see the whole movie and finally did a few weeks later. That was THE most horrific movie I had seen at that time. Now I can't wait to see this new one, but I agree that it looks more like a remake than a prequel.
 
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