6. Missed Opportunities
In the Carpenter film, the sight of this man, in frozen suicide, is chilling. Iced blood hangs from a razor blade gash along his forearm. What must he have suffered to be reduced to that outcome? Did we see his options dwindle as he raced through the base? Was the creature breaking down the door and he had nowhere to go? Sadly, we will never know because the prequel failed to show us. Everything that made the 1982 film great - bleak atmosphere, empty corridors, shadows and suspicion - is bereft in the prequel. As with Aliens, Terminator 2 and Dawn of the Dead, all the filmmakers had to do, was build on what made the originals so great yet it eschewed all of that for illogic and contradiction. The Thing (2011) didnt fail because the audience wasnt interested in a sci-fi horror. It failed because it ignored what made the original so great and spurned the opportunity to extend that films stunning legacy into a great lineage.