{"id":167555,"date":"2021-01-14T13:00:44","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T13:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gamerant.com\/john-carpenter-the-thing-critics-wrong\/"},"modified":"2021-01-14T13:00:44","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T13:00:44","slug":"what-critics-in-1982-got-wrong-about-john-carpenters-the-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/2021\/01\/14\/what-critics-in-1982-got-wrong-about-john-carpenters-the-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"What Critics In 1982 Got Wrong About John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Even though he’s among the most influential contemporary genre filmmakers, John Carpenter’s relationship with movie critics<\/a> and production studios has always been rocky.\u00a0After\u00a0Halloween<\/em>‘s success in 1978, Carpenter became a hot commodity, but the director was\u00a0far from interested\u00a0in helming\u00a0normal blockbusters with predictable plots. Instead, Carpenter made a series of paranoid and cynical cross-genre features that revel in atmospherics and slow-building tension. Mainstream audiences desirous of bloody\u00a0slashers, innocuous fantasies, or mindless action flicks didn’t\u00a0respond well to these features, nor did critics – who found Carpenter’s tone too apocalyptic and anti-authoritarian.\u00a0Of all the derailed Carpenter films,\u00a0The Thing\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>is by far the one critics were the most misguided about.<\/p>\n

Carpenter’s first big studio venture,\u00a0The Thing<\/em><\/a> was\u00a0produced by Universal Pictures, who\u00a0optioned to remake 1951’s\u00a0The Thing From Another Planet<\/em> a few years before Carpenter was hired to direct. With the help of\u00a0cinematographer Dean Cundey and special effects artist Rob Bottin, Carpenter\u00a0adapted Bill Lancaster’s screenplay about a parasitic, shape-shifting alien that wreaks havoc on\u00a0a group of American researchers in Antarctica. As the extraterrestrial moves from person to person, the all-male team gradually\u00a0implodes until the movie reaches a cold, dismal conclusion. When it was released on June 25, 1982, as a summer thriller,\u00a0The Thing<\/em> achieved mild success in theatres, earning $19 million<\/a> against its $15 million budget.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Director John Carpenter Shares Praise for Assassin\u2019s Creed Valhalla<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

That being said, most critics were disgusted by\u00a0The Thing<\/em>, which employs some of the most shocking body horror effects in cinematic history in order to bring the martian monster to life<\/a>. These detractors also didn’t appreciate Carpenter’s\u00a0quiet, ponderous\u00a0narrative style, which relies on long takes, wide shots, shadowy settings, and a synth-heavy soundtrack from Ennio Morricone to showcase the slow decline of\u00a0The Thing<\/em>‘s doomed characters. Nearly 40 years after\u00a0its release,\u00a0The Thing<\/em>\u00a0is now considered a landmark film that was criminally underrated during its time. With its innovative FX,\u00a0Lovecraftian ideas, dystopian environs, and ensemble cast that includes Kurt Russell and Keith David,\u00a0The Thing<\/em>\u00a0went on to inspire directors like\u00a0Guillermo del Toro<\/a> and Quentin Tarantino – to name a few. It also developed a major cult following over the decades thanks to its release on VHS and then DVD. This leaves an important question: how were critics so wrong about\u00a0The Thing<\/em>?<\/p>\n

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While some critics who wrote for\u00a0sci-fi\u00a0communities praised Rob Bottin’s insane contributions to\u00a0The Thing,<\/em>\u00a0many found the movie’s special effects unpalatable. In Newsweek<\/em><\/a>, David Ansen\u00a0asserted Carpenter\u00a0sacrificed\u00a0the film “at the altar of gore.” His sentiment was echoed by Vincent Canby in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>, who sarcastically urged anyone whose “needs are met by such sights as immolations [or] wormlike tentacles that emerge from the mouth of a severed head” to watch\u00a0The Thing<\/em>.\u00a0 Others, like Alan Spencer from the magazine\u00a0Starlog<\/em><\/a>, believed Bottin’s talents\u00a0were\u00a0wasted on Carpenter’s vision. “It’s almost like hiring Van Gogh to repaint a park bench,” Spencer wrote.<\/p>\n

Rob Bottin and his large crew of artists chose to make the creature’s presence known through the ways it mutates its host’s body in lieu of giving it a unique form.\u00a0The creature in\u00a0The Thing<\/em>\u00a0seeks to\u00a0make an exact replica of whoever it occupies, and the film graphically highlights aspects of each gruesome metamorphosis. From the conjoined dogs discovered mid-assimilation to\u00a0stomachs that grow mouths and spidery legs to stomachs that open up like mouths, Bottin worked closely with Carpenter to present audiences with a different kind of monster.\u00a0The shapeless, unidentified creature signals an early cinematic turn toward more Lovecraftian horror<\/a>, a trend critics in 1982 were clearly too daft to pick up on.<\/p>\n

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Lovecraftian dread also permeates every aspect of\u00a0The Thing<\/em>, whether it be\u00a0its tempo, its themes,\u00a0or its far from happy ending.\u00a0At its core,\u00a0The Thing<\/em> traces the dissolution of the group, leaving audiences to contemplate how easily people turn on each other during tense times. Carpenter’s refusal to back away from these dark\u00a0concepts led critics like Linda Gross\u00a0of the\u00a0LA Times<\/a><\/em> to call\u00a0The Thing<\/em> a “bereft, despairing, nihilistic” film that is “so frigid and devoid of feeling.” David Kehr echoed this sentiment in\u00a0The Chicago Reader<\/em><\/a>, citing the “every man for himself” attitudes demonstrated by the characters as a reason to avoid it. Carpenter knew exactly what he was doing by casting a group of\u00a0roughened, unreliable\u00a0men in the film: mocking mainstream movie tropes about masculinity, heroes, and camaraderie.<\/p>\n

Ultimately,\u00a0The Thing<\/em>‘s transgressive approach to\u00a0generating scares\u00a0kept it under the radar during its theatrical run<\/a>, where it was overshadowed by more family-friendly films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial<\/em> and\u00a0Poltergeist<\/em>.\u00a0Due to the film’s lackluster performance, Universal Pictures fired Carpenter, who was set to direct\u00a01984’s\u00a0Firestarter<\/em>. Carpenter’s\u00a0views about\u00a0major movie studios remain\u00a0contentious at best to this day. Carpenter stands\u00a0by\u00a0The Thing<\/em>, calling it one of his best works.\u00a0Thanks to a much-needed critical reassessment that began in the 1990s,\u00a0legions of\u00a0moviegoers and critics now feel the same way. There’s no doubt The Thing<\/strong><\/em> paved the way for sinister, unrelenting\u00a0films that\u00a0do away with audience expectations.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0John Carpenter Says He’s ‘Maybe’ Involved With The Thing Reboot<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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Most critics found Carpenter’s groundbreaking film equal parts disgusting and boring.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"What Critics In 1982 Got Wrong About John Carpenter's 'The Thing' - ITTeacherITFreelance.hk","description":"Most critics found Carpenter's groundbreaking film equal parts disgusting and boring."},"footnotes":""},"categories":[607],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167556,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167555\/revisions\/167556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}