"It wants to hide inside an imitation..."

The creature in The Thing imitates the people it kills, but it's just a copy, it's not really them. Just as this new version of the story that calls itself a prequel is in reality just a remake - an almost note-for-note restaging of John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi horror classic.

Carpenter's movie was perceived at the time as a disaster, having the misfortune of opening just two weeks after E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial. The audience at the time, giddy in love with Steven Spielberg's Reeses Pieces-gobbling cutie, reacted like they'd been offered a bowl of upchuck, and stayed away in droves. Universal even fired Carpenter from the movie he was about to direct, Stephen King's Firestarter. But then home video came into being and the movie found a rabid following. Now it's considered one of the greatest horror films of modern times.

Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. is clearly one of those fans. So much so that he's essentially made the same movie Carpenter did, recycling many of the earlier film's moods and key sequences. It's designed to be a prequel, letting us in on what happened to the Norwegian base that we saw after the fact in Carpenter's movie. Evidently nearly the exact same thing happened to them, too.

Which is not to say this is a bad movie, as it's much better than some of the reviews out there lead you to believe. It's well directed, the cast is good and the effects (largely CGI here) are convincing, though nowhere near as revolutionary as Rob Bottin's work in the 1982 version. While they give us the Norwegian camp, several of the main characters are Americans, visiting the Norwegian base. Uh...huh. You'd think given the popularity of all things Stieg Larsson and a Dutch director that Americanizing things wouldn't have been necessary, but think again. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Death Proof) is Science Officer Ripley-- I mean a paleontologist, hired by the Norwegians to help unearth the titular critter. Evidently they don't teach paleontology in Norway. She quickly begins to fear the worst, along with an American helicopter pilot.

Things chug along nicely, there are some very effective sequences and some decent shocks. The location work is awesome and the film has a realistic and moody sense of design. It's keeps you engaged and never fumbles the ball. There's a very inventive twist on the infamous blood test sequence in the Carpenter film. I won't spoil it here, but it was clever and realistic - it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but I bought it while watching the movie.

I'm not sorry I saw The Thing, I even really enjoyed parts of it. These guys did a good job. But you're left with a feeling of "What's the point?" It really is just a remake - getting dressed up in dad's clothes. At the end of the day it's a pretty good imitation of John Carpenter's movie. But it's still an imitation - and isn't fear of imitation really what the movie's supposed to make us scared of?