The Thing is really great, is not about Ben Grimm

Anne and I saw The Thing last night. tl;dr: I thought it was great.

It's a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter movie, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, and easily the best Sci-Fi/Horror film ever made. Normally, I would flat out refuse to see it, because I thought it was a remake/reboot, and I'm sick to death of those things. However, I'd heard that they gotten a lot of the practical effects guys together for it, and that was intriguing to me. When a bunch of friends were getting together to see it last night, that was all I needed to go ahead and give it a chance.

So, full disclosure: it turns out that my friend Eric wrote it. How I didn't remember this until I saw his name in the credits is a mystery, especially considering that the whole reason we all got together last night was specifically to watch it with him.

(This is what happens when I have Writer's Brain, and all I can think about is the story I'm working on. My mental CPU is usually at 180% and there's no virtual memory available for other tasks.)

Anyway, I really liked the movie. It's a prequel to the 1982 film, and it tells the story of the discovery of The Thing by the Norwegians, and what it does to them. It's scary, it's gory, and it does an absolutely fantastic job of respecting Carpenter's film, both in tone and story.

My only complaint is that one of the actors makes a really bad choice to play essentially the same note through the whole movie, which robs his character of what could have been a very satisfying arc.

When I mentioned on Twitter last night that I gave it 4.5/5 (the .5 being taken away for the aforementioned complaint), a bunch of people replied to me with various versions of "I hated it and you're stupid for liking it," which sort of baffles me. Now, as an unabashed fan of the 1982 film, maybe I have a connection to the story and the mythos that the average 20-something doesn't, but I don't think you need to be a fan of Carpenter's movie to enjoy this one.