The Thing movie review & film summary (2011)

The source is one of the most durable science-fiction stories of all time. Written as "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell Jr., it inspired a 1951 film by Howard Hawks, and a 1982 remake by John Carpenter. Its idea for an alien also transmuted into two versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and all of the "Alien" movies. In the 1950s, the earlier movies were read as allegories of the communist menace: Ordinary Americans were infested with Marxism, and although they continued to resemble your husband, cousin or boss, secretly they were a manifestation of an alien ideology.

The movie's setup: Scientists have discovered a spacecraft buried in the ice of the South Pole. A body is dug out in a block of ice, and … thaws. In the first film, scientists used instruments to determine the edges of the buried craft, and then chillingly realized they were standing in a saucer-shaped circle. It was the best shot in the film.

This new film once again finds useful the notion that the story takes place entirely within a closed system — a research station in Antarctica, or a spaceship traveling the void. Since the Thing prefers to inhabit its hosts secretly and remain in disguise, the plot comes down to a deadly puzzle: Of the people in the research station or on the spaceship, which are real and which are Things? Paranoia drives the plot.

There is a logical flaw here: Why would the Thing reveal itself before it had infected everyone? Why tip off the humans that there's a problem? Why, for that matter, wouldn't the Thing travel the universe and simply become every race, so that all life was Things?

The answer, obviously, is because such a story would be impossible. All these people would be in the research station, they'd look and behave like themselves for the whole movie, nothing exciting would happen until the last scene — and then, wow, what happened? We're all Things!

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