I’m going to kick this off with a movie I wish I had been exposed to years ago, but thankfully I finally watched in its incredible blu-ray release, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.
Maybe you’ve seen it, but if you haven’t, hopefully we can expose you to movies you’ve never given a chance or one’s you’ve never heard of. Either way, if it’s in this series, see if you can dig it up from somewhere, get it on blu-ray if you can, or at least throw it on your netflix queue (heck it might even be streaming). I guarantee that whether you share our taste in films or not, for people who enjoy film, anything in this series will be worth your time.
-Nick Harris
The Thing (1982)
From the first heartbeat synth notes of Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, the atmosphere has already dug its hooks into you. BUM… BUM-BUM… BUM-BUM… A lone helicopter flies over the vast, white expanse of the barren Anarctic. The sheer scope of the landscape immediately claustrophobic; in a place like this there’s nowhere to run. A gun shot echoes amongst the thrumming gravitas of the chopper blades. They are hunting something – a dog.
It’s 1982 and a scientific research team has just unearthed an alien ship buried in 100,000 years of ice. The pilot is revealed to be a shape-shifting creature; one that first takes the form of a sled dog, infiltrates the team, and soon begins to absorb them one by one in their isolated research facility.
The genius of this movie, however, is that it’s not really about the alien. The shape-shifting effects are terrifying and incredibly conceived, in fact they are some of the best from a time when these sorts of things were hand crafted (giving them a sense of being more visceral, I might add). But, as the researchers (led by Kurt Russell’s “Mac” MacReady) discover this “Thing” could be any one of them, paranoia over who can be trusted crumbles years of friendship, camaraderie, and faith. “The Thing” is the story of 12 desperate men, alone in the bitter freeze with nowhere to go… and so into the darkness they venture.
On the commentary track, John Carpenter and Kurt Russell recall saying throughout production that, “if at any point we don’t treat this story with complete and deadly seriousness, we will fail.”
And serious this movie is.
I have long said that what I love about film is that it can take you to impossible places. When I sit in that theater seat I like to go on a ride, an adventure; to see worlds and characters and conditions I’m never going to see in real life, but I want it to feel real.
The reason this movie is so effective is because they managed to take a far out concept of the “body snatcher” variety, stick it in a setting that’s unique and alien, yet of this world; and ground it with strikingly real characters. All of this and a trip into the darkness of man’s psyche make for something that you will never forget.
The cast and crew look back on the production as a miserable, grueling experience. Glamorous Hollywood film this was not, they lived it for 6 months. The clouds of breath in the air, the shivers from the extreme temperatures of an unforgiving location -- all are authentic.
The cinematography is perfect, the effects are bar none, and John Carpenter shows why he was once one of our most talented directors.
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