Movies: The Thing

From the offset, The Thing gets going, no time to stop and think, no time for questions. Curiously, this is a film with a great deal of characters, but which manages to get away without character building before any action occurs.

The Thing begins with said characters in the midst of scientific research, on which they have presumably been working for a lengthy amount of time, just as something malevolent starts to unfold. Stuck in a lab in Antartica, 12 men have been living together (for no doubt too long) and without making much progress. The main character of McCready is the biggest indicator of brewing contempt for his job and his colleagues. He is perpetually pissed off, bored, entertaining himself with computer chess and alcohol. The isolation of the location, combined with sharing the same living space with a lot of men and nothing to show for their work, is clearly shredding McCready's last nerve.

Another significant character in this respect is Clark. Seemingly cut off from the others, his time spent handling a pack of huskies makes him appear detached, but equally damaged by this lack of human connectivity.

The start of The Thing shows two unidentified non English-speaking men trying to hunt down a loose husky. Desperately, frantically and with a barrier in communicating, they try and fail to kill it, but instead wound one of the researchers, and manage to kill themselves, the mystery forever dying with them. Clark, more concerned with the husky than his fellow teammate, takes it to the dog pound to acquaint it with the others.

For the first time in likely a while, the men now have something serious to attend to. A handful of them travel to wherever the hunters came from, another lab that shows signs of something terribly wrong having occurred, then return to their own lab with a malformed corpse they've discovered.

Respectively, whilst the others take care of their injured comrade and study the corpse, they are further disrupted by the adopted husky having attacked the other dogs and displaying an inexplicable transformation. Armed with guns and a flamethrower, a melee ensues, with many of the dogs being destroyed. Clark intervenes at one point to try and preserve one of his own, despite it now having been attacked by the clearly alien husky. Animals, for Clark, have become more important to him than humans.

From that point on, a relentless ordeal of a movie plays out, ramping up the distrust and desperation in the men. The spread of infection of 'the thing' and a better understanding of what it actually is, soon makes it clear that an alien being preys on living things and takes their form, mimicking and masquerading as human (animal). Those who appear to be colleagues each has spent many months in the company of and whom each character feels they know well, now cannot be known for sure to be the real men, or mimics.

Thanks to the positions of the men having a use in this situation - the doctor, the scientist, the muscle - they might be able to find a way out of this mess. However, they will also have to overcome skepticism of one another, putting aside personal clashes that have already been brewing between some of them and learn to work together. The Thing becomes a test of trust and survival.

By all accounts, The Thing could have just ended up being a straightforward science fiction horror film about man versus alien. However, though there are many memorable, horrifying scenes utilizing the opportunity for gore and scares, much of the film consists of scenes where the men, diminishing one by one until there are only two survivors, are facing threat from within their own ranks. Blair the doctor, who has worked out the spread of infection rate and concluded the world is doomed, begins destroying the lab armed with an axe and a gun, with no qualms about shooting away the others who try to calm him down. He is eventually restrained, but is exiled to a separate shed on the compound for the protection of the others.

More distrust will evolve among the remaining colleagues, and in a fully equipped lab holding plenty of weapons - from guns, to axes, to dynamite - not to mention a parasitic being, a build up of tension and fear plays out before us. Since the men are faced with a deadly, body snatching alien, unable to distinguish who is really themself, the act of killing becomes questionable: are they killing someone they believe is inhuman, or murdering an innocent? This comes in to question when Clark, confronting and appearing to physically attack MacCready, is shot to death by MacCready. Though arguably self defence, albeit an extreme form, the fear and mistrust is clearly taking over, much like the alien itself is.

Eventually, one of the most intense scenes in a film graces our screens when the men, at this point down to six, are subjected to a makeshift test to work out who is infected, by the end leaving them down to just four.

Not only is The Thing unwilling to allow it's audience time to take a breath, offering little in the way of hope for these men who have done nothing to deserve their ill fate and have suffered enough just by being holed up together with little to show for their work, but it is also unwilling to give a resolution. The film ends with two survivors, sure, but we know either one, or maybe both, has been infected and even if they survive one another, they will unlikely survive the night by being left in extreme cold with no means of calling for help. They fought like hell, but unless you consider they at least contained the spread, sadly, it seems to have all been in vain.