Horror. R. 1 hour, 42 minutes. At area theaters.
That classic creature feature “The Thing” earns its third treatment with a film that’s so enthralled with its actual “thing” that it forgets to be scary or suspenseful.
A decent cast and a pristine glacial setting are wasted on a movie of alien transmutations and alien dissections that lacks urgency, or even a sense that it’s cold in Antarctica.
The Norwegians have found something Down There. And they want to keep it secret. So they drag a too-young American paleontologist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) with a bit of experience dealing with ancient frozen corpses and a few other folks in to figure out what it was.
The Norwegians, led by the arrogant Dr. Halvorsen (Ulrich Thomsen), smell a Nobel prize in this discovery. Keep it quiet. No radio contact with other bases on the continent, even though there’s a storm coming in. The Americans — Kate Lloyd (Winstead) and the helicopter pilots, Carter (Joel Edgerton) and Jameson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) — are instantly wary.
Something big, with claws, is carved from the ice. And then it’s out, and before you can say “We will search in groups of two or three,” it’s preying on the “We must study it” Norwegians and the trigger-happy Americans.
Here’s what works: The stunning location — what they use of it (British Columbia). The effects — including a shape-shifting creature of teeth and tentacles. The Norwegians — an amusing bunch, profane in English and in subtitled Norwegian. And hats off to Winstead for her wide- eyed reaction and breathless alarm.
But it’s a static picture — actors walking around when they should be running, ruminating when they should be panicking, failing to convey fear and pick up the pace. So this “Thing” doesn’t deliver much more than the odd jolt.
