The Thing Review

Carpenter's smartest decision was structural. The thing is never shown thinking, so the film never tells you who has been taken, and the blood test scene works because the audience is solving it at the same speed as the characters. Dean Cundey shoots the station in sodium orange interiors against blue black snow, and the widescreen framing keeps leaving empty space at the edges where someone could be standing. Rob Bottin was barely into his twenties and effectively lived on set for a year, and the chest defibrillator sequence and the kennel transformation are still the high water mark for practical creature work because they are built on the logic of a body being wrongly reassembled rather than on a monster design.

Ennio Morricone wrote a score that sounds like Carpenter, which is both funny and correct. Kurt Russell is very good, though the ensemble is thin in places and two or three of the crew never quite become people. It failed on release, which is one of the clearer critical misjudgements of the era.