I know I'm behind the curve here. Everyone with a shred of artistic integrity, intellectual pretension or simple iconoclasm has long since decried Hollywood for its shocking lack of originality, which has felt more pervasive every year since the major studios bought up the independent prodco's in the late nineties and then dismantled them.
But I never liked being part of the crowd ripping on Hollywood. It seemed too easy, too self-congratulatory.
On top of that, storytellers have ALWAYS ripped off their predecessors.
Shakespeare wrote only a handful of original plays in his life. The rest were all adaptations of other authors' work. They were remakes.
Just as evolution proceeds by repurposing existing genetic materials, so too storytelling proceeds by telling old stories in new ways.
And maybe that's what Hollywood was doing when it began this era of sequels, prequels and movies about board games.
But now we're not even telling old stories in new ways. We're telling old stories in old ways.
By way of evidence, I give you The Thing, a remake of John Carpenter's classic 1982 movie, which was itself a remake of a 1951 flick.
When Carpenter made his remake, he did something so obvious no one even gave it a second thought. He took the original story, set in 1951, and transposed it to the year 1982. Makes sense, right? The update allows the story to employ modern characters from modern society to explore an old plot in a -- that's right -- modern way. It freshens up the story.
So now we've got a remake of Carpenter's 1982 flick, only it's 2011 now.
Guess what year the 2011 flick takes place?
If you're really cynical about Hollywood, you'd say 1982. And you'd be right.
Isn't that awful?
Isn't that an abdication of the basic artistic responsibility to do something new with the material you're adapting?
And hey, I get the fact that the story intends to portray events that were suggested in the Carpenter movie but never shown -- namely, the fate of the Norwegian research base found destroyed by Kurt Russell's helicopter pilot McCready early in the 1982 film.
Couple problems with this:
One, the two main characters -- the fetching Mary Elizabeth Winstead and the fetching Joel Edgerton -- are both Americans. Pretty quickly, then, the movie feels less like an adjunct to the Carpenter film and more like a straight remake.
Two, the 1982 movie itself answers the question of what happened to the Norwegian research base. The dead Norwegians are only a mystery until Americans start turning up dead too, and then we sort of know what happened.
So if there's no good justification for setting the 2011 movie in 1982, why did the studio do it?
Because it makes the storytelling a lot easier, and a lot less risky.
The 1982 story worked in 1982, and is still popular today, so let's just re-gloss it and see if people will pay money to see it again.
And I did. I paid money.
I'm sort of a movie junkie, so I don't feel I had much choice.
But you can be free. You can still have a normal life.
If you love the Carpenter film, rent it.
If, on the other hand, you're a hopeless victim of the Hollywood marketing machine, then at least you're going to find some kernels of enjoyment in this -- ahem! -- modern version of The Thing.
You're going to enjoy Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
Those big wet eyes, that nerdy gracefulness, that nice deep voice that lets you take her a little seriously as a scientist.
She's great. And you're going to enjoy her.
You're also going to enjoy the second act of the movie. The first act is unbelievably wooden and sterile, the third act is incredibly implausible and contrived -- it takes place on board an alien spaceship, which has never yet worked on screen -- but that second act -- which captures the cool central idea of The Thing storyline -- antarctic scientists trapped in a storm trying to figure out who among them is human and who is a murderous alien -- works pretty well.
You're going to be surprised by how much you enjoy scenes that are flagrant reproductions of iconic scenes from 1982 -- from the "test" to determine who is alien; in the Carpenter film, blood samples were heated with an electric coil; in this one, a flashlight is directed into the mouth to look for metal fillings -- to the frantic anxiety over a flamethrower that sputters at the absolute worst time. You're going to say "Sheesh, this is almost a scene-by-scene refilming of Carpenter." But you're still going to enjoy it a little.
Which goes to show just how good those 1982 scenes were.
Overall, you're going to have an okay time watching 2011's The Thing.
But if you have any conscience at all, you'll feel bad about yourself afterward.
SCORE
How Accomplished: 22/100
How Accomplished It Would Be if the Carpenter film did not exist: 62/100
How Much I Enjoyed: 66/100
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