A proper remake of The Thing

I am a big supporter of remakes that have a point. A point beyond "reaching a new audience" (which is pretty transparent code for "more dollars"), at least. I think that if one can improve on a story, or tell it in a new and interesting way, then by all means - remake the sucker. So when I started hearing about the remake of John Carpenter's The Thing, already itself a remake, I was equal parts curious and apprehensive. The inclusion of female characters especially piqued my interest - the 1982 film had an all-male cast, unless you count the computer Kurt Russell used to play chess. I tried to overlook the fact that one of these women was Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the charisma vacuum at the center of Final Destination 3 and that horrible Scott Pilgrim movie. 

How is this picture so boring? IT HAS A FLAMETHROWER IN IT.

I tried to ignore the nagging suspicion that this new iteration would go overboard on the CGI, robbing us of the sweaty, fleshly, and goopy charms of the "original." (Seriously, Rob Bottin's work in 1982, done completely without the aid of computers, is an absolute marvel. Even better than his work on The Howling, if you ask me.) 


But as soon as the PR team started throwing the word "prequel" around, I surrendered to my misgivings. Anyone who saw and loved Carpenter's film would know exactly how redundant a prequel would be here. All we needed was the tragic and creepy hints of that story - an axe lodged in a door, two Norwegians' frantic determination to kill a dog - to understand how we got here. Choosing to stuff a prequel in where there was no need could only prove that these people had no interest in or respect for the story being told. 


Well, you better believe that I have a borderline-rabid interest in and respect for The Thing, and since this 2011 remake/prequel - premake? - was such a bomb, it's safe to assume that my ideas are better. (My logic, it is sound.) To be honest, it's only one main idea, but still a good one: I would love to see The Thing with an all-female cast. At the core of the 1982 version is an examination of what happens when a very isolated group of men who are already going stir-crazy is put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation. Wouldn't you want to see what happens when it's a very isolated group of women? To see how deep loneliness, distrust, and fear affect women who know and like or dislike each other to varying degrees? The jumping off point, before the group realizes they've been infiltrated by an alien, probably wouldn't feel too far off from a women's college during winter finals.* 


Plus, for the most part, horror movies with a primarily female cast tend to just sexualize and trivialize the so-called characters so that they're all just interchangeable bimbos. I think remaking The Thing with women would be a step towards reversing that trend, not unlike Hausu or The Descent. 

Not pictured: characters.

In that spirit, I put together my dream cast list. If you haven't seen the '82 version (which you SHOULD! It's on Netflix Instant!) this list will mean little to you, which is fine. This is more for me than for you anyway. 


*It is pretty bleak.

I love the 80s - Ryan Gosling's Drive defends the decade

A lot of the reviews of Ryan Gosling's Drive, an excellent and heartbreaking film, call it an "80s throwback" - and surprisingly, they don't mean it as an insult. For the most part, critics and cinephiles malign the 1980s as being the worst decade for movies. When 2010's The Expendables lurched onto the scene, these same people were moaning "the 80s are back!" Why do the 80s always get such a bad rap?

Even outside the world of movies, the 80s have become shorthand for all the worst elements of American society. We deride the music, fashion, politics, and perceived sentiments of the whole time period. The hit VH1 series "I Love The..." started out with the 80s, with a menagerie of talking heads ragging on pop culture items of the time. It was a weird but irresistible exercise in brutalizing nostalgia that helped shape the image 20-somethings like me have of the decade. So now when we hear "80s," we see aviators, acid-wash jeans, and Top Gun.

The first result if you Google "80s." I'll wait for your seizure to end.

Part of it also has to be that the 80s directly follow the 70s, which we've all been trained to say is the golden age. But if a quintessentially 70s movie like Taxi Driver kicked off the cinematic exploration of urban alienation, there were a dozen excellent movies in the 80s that both broadened and deepened that. Movies like Blade Runner, The Thing, and The Shining were dark, misanthropic, and almost oppressive in their depiction of loneliness. Aliens, probably the best sequel of all time (which improved upon its 70s predecessor, by the way), wore its subversive nature on its sleeve - the gung-ho militarism that we remember the decade for was thwarted and destroyed, and the bond between a grieving mother and an orphaned girl was celebrated. And Drive continues that lonely, alienated tradition beautifully.

The cosmetic links are obvious - we've got a synth-pop soundtrack, aviators, a bewildering satin bomber.

Seriously, though. Bewildering.

We've got Ryan Gosling's The Driver, a direct descendant of both Travis Bickle and Rick Deckard. Like Bickle, he is off-kilter and unsettling in a way that is initially attractive to the two-dimensional blonde angel he falls for. He ferries people around while making a point of keeping his distance from them. And like Deckard, he is so quiet and removed from humanity that his own humanity is suspect - Deckard because he may be a replicant, the Driver because he probably falls somewhere between "moderate" and "severe" on the autism spectrum.


And we've got a plot straight from a neo-noir tragedy, with seedy mobsters, feeble friends, and a pervasive sense of dread that hits you even before the bloodied bodies start to stack up (and do they ever).

Creations like I Love the 80s would have you believe that the only working actors between 1981 and 1990 were testosterone lumps like Stallone and Schwarzzenegger, and brash young hellraisers like Cruise. But ignore those for a second. The protagonists who really last, the ones who really stick in your mind like a little burr, are one just like the Driver - trying and usually failing to transcend their demons and the demons who surround them. Their movies are about evil and hostility, the futility of redemption, and the emptiness of the American dream. The 80s gave us some of the darkest and most beautiful films of all time, and I like to think that Drive, being a brutal little gem of a movie, goes a ways in defending the decade's honour.