why is THE THING (2011) a worthy prequel?

The thing... I saw it and I wasnt exited about it, but is entertaining.. the best part is the final, because you know you will take your 1982 movie and you will watch it again.

indeed, it's back on again, while I type, the DVD just ended, interface came up, then it started to re-play, and I'm enjoying it all over again ... can't wait for the madness to begin again. LOL

Carpeneter's The Thing is no3 on my list of favourite Science Fiction films. The prequel wasn't bad I just feel it was pretty unnecessary. There's nothing that needs to be explained, other than why the creature crash landed in the first place! That in itself doesn't need to be covered as it isn't a plot hole in any way. What let it down, for me, were the creature effects. They came nowhere near Rob Bottins incredible mechanical effects. They were mind-blowing & have stood the test of time. Pity they couldn't have had him on board for the Prequel, can you imagine it.....Bottin's mind + CGI. An opportunity missed, alas. As you said FreePlanet it ties in perfectly, & sets up the first scene from the original, shot for shot. Prometheus didn't do that, but we'll have to wait a while before we can be sure if further sequels will solve our lack of a direct 'tie-in', or not.

Yer the new thing was awful compared with the old one it basically copies ideas from the first and make them look worse! Im sorry but prometheus makes this film look bad and that is saying something! And TBH ridley may have had stick for just doing a run of the mill leading up to alien film it may have been quiet boring :S but who knows...

I very much enjoyed the 2011 version of [i]The Thing[/i]. Actually, I went into the cinema thinking that it was going to be a remake (given the title) but was pleasantly surprised when the ending (and the ending's music) merged seamlessly into the start of the 1982 version. I suggest that people remain patient if they are looking for a Hollywood explanation of the Space Jockey on LV426. It was always in Ridley's mind to have at least two movies that would tie the first and the last together. Me, looking back in a decade or so, I'm sure I'll be happy to see 6 or 8 hours of Scott's vision rather than 4.

The Thing prequel, IMO, does three things... - Explains what happened to the Scandinavian base, as hinted at in Carpenters original. - Leads up to the very beginning of Carpenters original. - Reintroduces elements from 1951's "The Thing from Another World". Granted it could have been made so much better, but it did do what it set out to do which was to be a prequel. But comparing this movie to Prometheus is misguided. Yes, originally the film was meant to be a direct prequel, as was evidenced by Jon Spaihts original screenplay, but when Lindelof came onboard Prometheus moved away from being a prequel and instead became an extension to the franchise, examining the mythology of the Engineers.

The Thing is one of those movies, even with a limited budget, that became a timeless classic in my book. Not so much for the effects (although they scared the hell out of me), or even the acting... what really set it aside is the whole package and how it made me feel afterwards. The underlying theme for me was terror of the unknown, our weakness to all that is new and strange, and our lack of wisdom when confronted with something so alien and different that we resort to our primitive selves. The New movie I felt was a typical combination of Hollywood story telling (budgets, a lack of one vision, last minute changes in the plot), and having to deal with an established story plot. The original story "Who goes there," was a somewhat complex short story but it did show a plot of untrust that moves the entire story forward. Was the new movie a worthy companion to the original, yes I have watched over 5 times now and it still scares me to think that if some(THING) was to in fact finds it's way here... would we survive.... I very much doubt it. That is the most scary part of all these stories...

Both movies are flawed they both could have been done better. The one thing that disappoints is they was always going to like with Star Wars EP1-3.. You see Alien and Aliens (for some) The Thing and Star Wars Original Trilogy are all classics and when you have iconic movies that are not touched up on for a long time when you make a sequel or prequel well you have a very very high bar raised to better. Yes there are plot holes in the Thing 2011..... the Original USA Outpost 31 never found much English Documents etc when they visited the Norwegian out post... so how come the out post was manned by a number of Americans. But alas you risk effecting the potential Box Office Hits from none Fanatical Thing fans if you go for a authentic route and have Norwegian's subtitled or even speak in Norwegian English Accent. The same goes with Prometheus if they simply aimed the movie at Alien Fanboys who wanted answers and we had a direct link and answer. The Alien franchise got a lot of stigma and so none Alien fans would turn around and think... oh no not another Alien movie with Xenos running wild. For me the Thing was rushed, it seemed that they got to a point that they was running out of time and budget to finish the movie and so some of the CGI and some scenes was rush job and not good enough. More time, one or two more noticeable actors and bigger budget and the Thing would have been much better. The biggest gripe i had was with how Kate had survived the movie was not bad until the last scenes... apart from the very last Dog Chase scene. You kind of knew what the Thing was going to be, you knew even before it was filmed that it would show the Norwegians find the Space Ship dig it up and bring back the Thing encased in its Icy Tomb and then it would thore out and cause havoc. And that we would see the Norwegian Two Faced Thing before it got toasted and that the end we would see the Dog Thing escape and get hunted down by two surviving Norwegians Ridley did not want to go that route with Prometheus, they did not want to go for a movie where on LV 426 they come across this Alien Race who fly Derelicts who have a weapons base that has Eggs, or that show how the Eggs was created. The aim of the movie was not to say.. Here is the Space Jockey Here is how the Eggs are made/found Here is why they was on that ship and where they was going. Ridley took a bold route to explore the Space Jockeys as a Race who created many things including mankind and base the many Ancient Civilizations depictions of Gods and Ancient Astronaut Theory and tie it to the Space Jockeys. Thats why Ridley went with the Humanoid look of the Space Jockey now called Engineers. However he always and a long time before Prometheus had the Space Jockey as a Space Suit....

All this fear reminds me "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" :p

@Lone I agree it could have been left unexplained... But then again so could Alien.... And i guess Ridley has gone and touched up on just the Engineer and who that Space Jockey was and left the other questions unanswered. He has opened a can of worms as the movie was a disappointment and never quite hit the kind of attention he intended and most fans who saw it and more than once was fans who enjoyed Alien and wanted to find out who that Space Jockey was and some may also wanted other answers. So i think Ridley will answer those eventually on his terms and i feel we wont tie in Prometheus to Alien until Prometheus 3. Good news is Ridley is not young, he would have wanted to had expanded Alien in his way but he never got to do that and i dont think he would want to see Prometheus 2 and 3 etc be done without his creative input... This means at nearly 75 in order for him to put his stamp and connect the story he wants to tell about the Engineers and Mankind and there links and then the Xeno connection and reason, he has to finish this franchise sooner rather than latter. I expect Prometheus 2 to be like Back to the Future 2 or like LOTR Parts 2 and 3 and that they will work on a lot of Prometheus 3 at same time and just after. So if Prometheus 2 lands in 2014-2015 i expect the wait for Prometheus 3 to be a lot less and so 2015-2016. PS.... by disappointment i dont mean the movie for me... I mean that i am sure Fox and Ridley expected this movie to be a bigger hit and engage more casual viewers than it did, that was the risk mind. You see if he catered the movie just for Alien fans then he would alienate casual sci fi fans a little and would not get the casual viewer to go see the movie, so he had toned down the Alien elements and made the movie different as he knew the Alien fans would see the movie regardless. So he put enough in there to appease the Alien Fanboys to a certain level. the movie is left open which leaves room to explain and connect and explore the Xeno Origins in future movies.

I always imagined Invasion of the Body Snatchers to be a semi-sequel to the Thing.

The Pod People....they're here already....YOU'RE NEXT!!!!!

@ snorkelB .....yes, both are very similar in terms of paranoia, but very different about the purpose of extermination and and the lost individuality. @lone not distrust of me, me the same, lets move to the dark corner, to talk about it. ^^

The way I always saw it it was... ...McReady and Childs burned the remains of the last Thing, the smoke billowing up to the clouds would have contained cells from the creature, that are then carried by our planets many weather fronts before falling with the rain and infecting plants, leading to the birth of the pods...

I often thought that the cells had landed on small children who then developed a taste for glue in elementary school.... staff: Weyland Corp. Child Psychology and Development Titan Base

patch kat gets Best Response Award - no prize, just pride in a job well done.

Lone, the good thing is, IT MAKES YOU WANT TO WATCH THE ORIGINAL again, it leads you back into nostalgia. :)

So you're basically saying The Thing (2011) is a good movie solely because it explained the events prior to The Thing(Original)? Of course it has to do it since its a prequel...so leave that out, and you got nothing to praise about the piece of crap movie. No suspense, no thrill, nothing worthy to discuss about. Garbage ass movie, I can't believe you even mentioned this movie next to Prometheus as if it has any connection.

"Ah, the Cells!...The Cells!........T'was the [i]Cells[/i] that made me deaf, you know?!...."

Is it just me or the most of the prequel set the same set to that of the original and the move the story characters here and there with some slaughter and do the end in such way that there are some more questions and also pretend at the same time as if it answered many questions? Only prequel which made sense to me is - Rise of the planet of apes. Story was cool with nothing related to the previous movies and also the end of the story was awesome.

Sky, ah, yes, Planet of the Apes, didn't like that film at all. But yes keep-itreal, The Thing 2011 was a) a good old-fashioned monster-morphin' film, if you like that sorta thing, which I do/did and b) it did EXACTLY what a PREQUEL should have done i.e. it got you to the original and made you wanna rewatch that. It has all the relevance IN THE WORLD to what happened with Prometheus, the prequel that never was*. *Yet was marketed as a prequel RIGHT UP UNTIL THE END, when they had to come out and admit they HADN'T SUCCEEDED in keeping their 'promise'. Maybe next one isn't called PARADISE but is called PROMISED LAND for the debt it owes its own narrative questions. When they finally GET TO ALIEN in some prequel-like fashion.

Scott NEVER marketed the film as a prequel! To my recollection all he and everyone involved did was try to get it across toi people that it was NOT a prequel. They took the word ALIEN out of the title for that reason. Yet there are still to this day people who go see the film and bitch about how it's not a prequel and how it never showed how the SJ arrived on LV-426. Personally, I'm thrilled it wasn't a prequel. This way they can let the mysteries that made Alien so great in the first place remain mysteries as well as showing us more about the Engineer race and telling a completely new story. For the record, I like the prequel of The Thing. However, I do understand why a prequel of that nature is a bit pointless. We know how it's going to turn out. But like I said, I like it. Prequels like that have their place, I suppose but how many of them actually turn out decent? Most are shit. Ridley knows that. If you're a fan of Ridley's work then I would think that you would know that he's the LAST director that would want to tell a story that you know the ending of. Also, he might not go as far as, say, David Lynch but it's obvious he's not a director that feels or wants to have to EXPLAIN everything. In all, Prometheus was EXACTLY what they marketed the film as. A film with ties to Alien but DEFINITELY not a prequel. Ridley put the ending on to try and satisfy certain people but it seems all it did was irritate them even more. Most of the people who thing the prequel to The Thing is good are die hards. It feeds on our fondness of the original and gives us a similar but far inferior ride. Nostalgia does not make a great film. But it can make a bad or mediocre film seem great. This is also something Ridley would NEVER rely on as was the case with The Thing. Furthermore, the way she killed the thing at the end was about as horrible as it could get. I know the original was made in the 80's but did you have to rip off throwing an explosive into the mouth of the beast to kill it. Talk about something that's been done to death. That really was one of the biggest let downs in cinema history.

Engineering, Prometheus was MARKETED (by 20th Century Fox) as The Prequel to Alien. It was GOING to explain the Space Jockey (the real one) and 'scare the shit out of us', in Ridley's own words. Not 'some other back-engineering of the spacejockey tech, but the real snorkelguy, fossilised to his seat. Instead, Lindelof cranked up his LOST-like Mystery Making Machine and we still don't know a) where the REAL Ganesha Space Jockey came from or what it REALLY was, and b) we're still all not scared, not one of us. Funnily enough, as I was watching a REAL prequel, The Thing (2011), as soon as they started roaming around the Scandinavian base under torchlight, I instantly thought about one of my favourite TV shows, MOST HAUNTED. I know it's all fake or set up or scripted, but I just can't get enough of that trash. Ya know?

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18298709]NOT A PREQUEL#1[/url] [url=http://www.hollywood.com/news/Prometheus_Alien_Prequel_Trailer/11677412]NOT A PREQUEL #2[/url] [url=http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2011/12/01/prometheus-isnt-an-alien-prequel-swears-fox-studio-chief/]NOT A PREQUEL #3[/url] [url=http://www.alienprequelnews.com/2011/11/fassbender-prometheus-is-not-prequel-to.html]NOT A PREQUEL #4[/url] [url=http://screenrant.com/prometheus-alien-prequel-noomi-rapace-rob-96519/]NOT A PREQUEL #5[/url] [url=http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/01/14/alien-prequel-prometheus-ridley-scott/]NOT A PREQUEL #6[/url] Seriously, there are pages and pages of search results for these articles and interviews. Do I need to keep posting them? BTW, some date back to over a year ago so it's not like they waited until the last minute to let people know.

it doesn't really matter if its prequel or not.

How does it not matter if it's aprequel or not? I think it has quite a bit of importance to fans. I would say most fans wanted a straight prequel and were very dissapointed that it wasn't one. Like I said, I'm of the opinion that the way they went was the best way to go. Too many prequels and remakes as it is. Funny how people bitch and complain about prequels and remakes then get mad that a director tries to do something original that really is the best of both worlds. Please let me know how it doesn't matter.

Quote=FreePlanet...[i]"*Yet was marketed as a prequel RIGHT UP UNTIL THE END"[/i] The below quote was taken from an MTV interview with Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Tom Rothman. The interview was done on December 1, 2011. [i]"It is not [an 'Alien' prequel]. It's not," Rothman passionately defended when MTV News pressed him on the question at the Gotham Awards this week. "Hand on heart."[/i] Below was taken from an article posted on January 14th, 2011... [i]"Fox announced today that the project once known as “The Alien Prequel” has morphed into something else entirely — a film called Prometheus, slated for release March 9, 2012. The script, written by Scott and Damon Lindelof, will tell a completely different science fiction tale. “While Alien was indeed the jumping off point for this project, out of the creative process evolved a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place,” Scott explains in the press release. “The keen fan will recognize strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak, but the ideas tackled in this film are unique, large and provocative.” Swedish actress Noomi Rapace (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) is already attached to star in one of the film’s five major roles, a “scientist” named Elizabeth Shaw."[/i] I do see what you're saying though. When they first started on the project it was an Alien prequel. But they gave plenty of warning that it wasnt. I see why and how some may be upset. I understand. I do.

[b][i]Once known as[/i][/b], prequel hard to refute then? Actually, being charitable to Scott and his Team, it seems that (as the Space Jockey tech was back-engineered to Engineer purpose) the Alien-origin narrative ideal was back-engineered to Neo-Franchise purpose. Remember, also, that the Alien-prequel project went through [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(film)#Development]many stages over many years[/url] I refer the honourable gentleman to a phrase 'which was soon afterwards expressed as a then untitled prequel to Alien'. But, anyway, I've said this before, "We don't always get First Base truths out of art-directors like Scott," for example he reported that he was working on the Blade Runner Prequel until he admitted he'd be approaching a Sequel. Who can ever tell what goes on in a commercial artist's Corporate-Controlled i.e. [b]profit[/b]-driven mind.

@ Freeplanet... As Engineering pointed to many times and explained more than once - Prometheus is not a prequel to Alien. Yes, at one point in its pre-production it was a prequel to Alien, but it stopped being one the moment Damon Lindelof was brought on board to re-write the script. And from that point onward Ridley stated many, many times that Prometheus was not a prequel to Alien but a film "that explores its own mythology, but with strands of Alien DNA in the story".

Its amazing how people tend to change true facts around. Prometheous was never billed as a prequel when it day viewed on screen. Mr. Scott time after time said that the film would stand on its own. The problem with this franchise is that fans are in love with the Xenomorphs. They would love to watch the Xenos on film for two hours straight.