Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Kate Lloyd, an American paleontologist recruited to join a Norwegian science team which has discovered "a structure and a specimen" buried in the Antarctic for a hundred thousand years. While her skills in studying frozen corpses of ancient Earth beasts is appreciated and needed by the team leader Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), Kate feels a definite chill from her fellow scientists upon arrival and finds it hard to earn their trust and respect. Kate's personal isolation among the otherwise cohesive team forms the spine of this prequel's dramatic plot, jump-starting the paranoia which soon runs rampant in the camp once the Thing's first victims fall. Halvorson's only concern is preserving his discovery for the ages, which he quickly makes a higher priority over the safety of his team.  His compulsion is a nice character callback to Dr. Carrington's inhuman monomania from 1951's THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, the first film adaptation of Campbell's story by producer Howard Hawks, but Halvorson's shallowly written character makes his obsession more plot function than personality trait. By the time Kate discovers the Thing's alien ability to mimic its victims on a cellular level, Halvorson has so undermined her role on the team that no one — not even his sympathetic assistant Adam (Eric Christian Olsen) who witnesses the cell study — supports Kate's scientific theory and dire warning. By the time others believe the Thing is assuming human identities among the team, it's far too late to save lives and stop it's predatory plan.

If this all sounds familiar to fans of Carpenter's film starring Kurt Russell as the camp's chopper pilot forced into the same role of reluctant leadership, that is by design for this prequel for better and worse. While few would consider the 1982 shocker to be an in-depth character study, its script fought hard to build and maintain personal tension between the American science team members who discover the Norwegian camp's disastrous aftermath. Where Carpenter manufactured angst-ridden paranoia that fueled his character's fight for survival against the Thing, Heijningen's Who Goes There? adaptation plays out more like a 'who dunit' murder mystery that generates more suspense than dramatic tension. By setting Kate apart from the Norwegians so early in the story, her only ally the American pilot Sam (Joel Edgerton), this THING becomes a simplified us against them battle of wills until too many Norwegians are killed to make such character-based battles even relevant to the story. The strength of Carpenter's take on Campbell's story was its larger horrific question: what is our unique identity as a human and what happens if we lose that precious distinction from other's around us. Beyond the prequel's lesser quest to avoid being killed and absorbed by this alien invader, Carpenter posed the existential problem of how do we prove our identity to our fellow humans — or even more terrifying, would we even know our personal identity has been corrupted? Eric Heisserer's script never achieves that last step beyond mere mortal survival with a killer on the loose, that leap of the imagination which involves the audiences' minds to question not only the characters on screen but themselves as they watch.

THE THING earns points for its chilling, horrifying artistry which steeps viewers in this frozen landscape of nightmares, with credit due to Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. for their spectacular creature and makeup effects that put the requisite gore in gorgeous for movie monsters fans. The duo, whose creature credits include ALIENS and STARSHIP TROOPERS, devised many of the Thing's gruesome transformations as physical on-set monsters with only some CGI-enhancement and these touches of reality boost the film's believability. High marks to production designer Sean Haworth, art director Patrick Banister and set decorator Odetta Stoddard for making the most of the Antarctic environment and faithfully reverse-engineering the Norwegian camp which we only saw destroyed in 1982. Likewise composer Marco Beltrami melds his synth-based score with Ennio Morricone's 1982 music to recreate and salute the tonal currents of Carpenter's original. On several fronts, Heijningen's film hits the right notes but lacks a fresh take on the Thing's mythology that would have made it a partner to Carpenter's film and not just a worshipful homage to the sinewy, slimy terrors of the cult classic.

For those devotees to the 1982 film — and there are many who will buy a ticket this weekend to challenge the newcomer film's faithfulness — the prequel dovetails nicely (if a little too deliberately) into the opening of Carpenter's film. Some directly transferred details are quite creative like the reason the Americans find the split-face Thing-corpse outside the wrecked Norwegian camp, while other evidence like the fire axe stuck in the wall are slight letdowns in execution. The 'radio operator' who slit his wrists seems rather hastily inserted into the film's finale, symptomatic of how the prequel often slights dramatic moments to pursue its creature chase so relentlessly to its conclusion. FilmEdge admits we were skeptical about the apparent continuity problems between how the Norwegians discover the Thing's buried spacecraft and how the Americans found it in the 1982 film, but with some post-film pondering the crossover solution is plausible if not entirely probable given how little time elapses between the end of this prequel and the opening of Carpenter's original. The larger problem here is that apparently more time was spent developing the origins of all these iconic moments and clues than was spent developing empathetic, identifiable characters who tragically start the Thing's alien cycle of death and rebirth on Earth.

The 2011 version of THE THING is an ambitious hybrid of sequel storytelling and fan adoration, but despite all its technical exactness and creature grotesquery it fails to fully engage its human story to make its devoted efforts completely worthwhile. If you loved Carpenter's inspirational shocker, you'll probably like this one. If you've never seen Carpenter's film and are seeking a few Halloween season thrills and chills with a heaping helping of human/monster morphing, this might satisfy your appetite for scares. Back in 1982, Carpenter's ultraviolent and disgusting monster moments caused the film to fall box office victim to the feel good blockbuster of that summer, Steven Spielberg's E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL. Removed from that cinematic context, Carpenter's sci-fi horror built a devoted following and revised critical kudos as a landmark entry in the genre. It's hard to imagine Heijningen's prequel garnering a similarly devoted audience of fans twenty years hence since it lacks enough heart to make it resonate as well across future decades. Given how deliberately this 2011 entry in the mythology is linked to its 1982 progenitor, such comparisons are not only fair they're unavoidable. THE THING earns three stars for some good creature feature scares that intimidate but never truly assimilate its target audience's hunger for psychological terror and stomach-turning horror.

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