If you remember, Universal’s developing a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Ronald D. Moore, perhaps best known now as the main man behind the recent Battlestar Galactica series, was hired to write a script for Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. to direct. The Thing opened with Norwegians chasing a wolf via helicopter across Antarctica until stumbling into the American camp. The Norwegians died in the incident and the wolf turned out to be a shape-shifting alien being that could assimilate and/or take over other lifeforms. As Carpenter’s film had it, the alien’s spaceship had been found buried in the ice by the Norwegian expedition which brought the creature back to its base where all hell broke loose. The prequel is supposed to tell this story in full.
Eric Heisserer is now rewriting Moore’s script and spoke to Bloody Disgusting, offering a few confirmations and new details. First up, he confirms the rumor that a brother of MacReady, Kurt Russell’s character, appeared in Moore’s version, but wouldn’t say whether the new character was in his revisions. Now, I don’t think anyone has managed to figure out why MacReady’s brother might have been at the Norwegian camp or why MacReady wouldn’t have known about his presence. Furthermore, what could this possibly contribute to the story outside of an arbitrary link to the original? Second, Heisserer talks about how they’re painstakingly trying to imagine the events the lead to the carnage MacReady finds at the Norwegian base when he goes to check it out. It’s cool that they seemingly respect the original, but all those background elements weren’t designed to support an actual story being built out of them. This is writing by connect-the-dots.
Third, Heisserer says they’re “finding so much from Carpenter’s movie that you think you’ve seen, but in actually it allows us to come up with certain twists on what we have that will allow people to be on the edge of their seat, and not know who’s going to make it and who’s not.” Is he saying we somehow don’t know who lives and dies from the Norwegian group? The original opens with us seeing two men chase the wolf and both die, one via a botched grenade toss and the other shot by the Americans for shooting one of their men by accident. The wolf, or rather the Thing, is the only survivor there is ever evidence to support. Is he hinting that they’re going to find some way to retroactively change what the events of The Thing mean? These statements scare me.
Of course, all of these questions are secondary to why this project exists in the first place. Has there ever been a person to watch The Thing and demand to know more about how the Norwegian camp was killed? Besides Universal executives, obviously. Alien spaceship is dug up in Antarctica and kills all off the humans at a Norwegian base before being chased into another camp. What’s to expand upon? There’s nothing to tell. Only in Hollywood would this be turned into a full movie, a Hollywood that has come to see any and every old film that begins in media res as an invitation for a pointless prequel or origin story. No character is worth exploring unless it can be done from the very moment they became notable and no story can be told without the entire damned backstory being shown in painful detail. Besides, we’ve already seen an Antarctic outpost’s crew deal with a shape-shifting creature that sows suspicion and paranoia amongst everyone. What could this one add while being so limited by having its outcome completely predetermined?
If Universal is so desperate to leverage this property, why not just set up some mysterious scenario where the Thing has emerged in some other part of the world where a different kind of character set and environment could shape something a little more unique? They could avoid even commenting on The Thing’s ambiguous ending by having a completely different alien ship be found, or by just never commenting on how the creature ever made it off Antarctica in the first place. Let the audience imagine how that may have occurred.
So yeah, if you can’t tell I find this whole thing to be a totally misguided and unnecessary fool’s errand. But with the current industry trends, I shouldn’t be the least surprised.
