The Thing From Another World

The Thing From Another World

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This was more unnerving, also, knowing the world was just beginning to uncurl and become a larger place. I often think what it's going to be like when we are cut off from everyone here on this small island. Yet the cynical part of me feels like it's typical of 1951 to want the door slammed tight shut and the point of The Thing from Another World is precisely that: not that you can't trust your employers but that anything else out there has got to be up to no good!

In The Thing from Another World, a thing from another world drops a catastrophe album in Antarctica where a group of scientists, military and journalists decide to be so human that it has to end badly. Real seeming dialogue and an interesting story ensue. Paced so that it starts off developing the story within a few minutes. The film is well acted (a bit more naturalistic than normal films from this era) and directed with a message that still resonates today.

One thing not mentioned much about The Thing from Another World is that it's a terrific production. The confined warren of the arctic lab really looks assembled from prefab sections hauled in by plane, and the frequent icy breath of the actors reminds us that the cold up there is real. All the rooms appear to have full ceilings. There are some curious sets with big heat-losing windows (the General's have quaint curtains on them), and some thin doorways open directly between indoors and outdoors in an unlikely way. \"Shut the door, it's 30 below outside\". Other than that, we really believe we are where Hawks says we are.

I've never been very interested in the 'controversy' over who directed The Thing from Another World. It's obviously Hawks, or the whole thing was planned and rehearsed by him. Editor Nyby needed a credit to join the director's guild and Hawks helped him out. If anything, it shows Hawks' willingness to disassociate himself from The Thing - he'd invented the Sci-Fi monster picture, and (I'm guessing) didn't value it at the same level as the rest of his work. It had no stars, wasn't going to win any awards, etc. He was probably right. Once the Sci-Fi pictures had become stereotyped as made of little more than a flashy poster and a rubber monster, with no-name casts, most mainstream directors avoided them.

Warners' DVD of The Thing from Another World is an okay but not stunning disc. The one laser disc that reinstated the scenes trimmed for a reissue, could only present them in much-degraded 16mm. It was easy to see what had once been cut out (as with the long cut of The Big Sky on TCM). Here, it almost looks as if the cut scenes have been improved in telecine, but the scenes around them de-sharpened slightly to make a better match! This probably isn't the case, and lazy compression has softened things a bit, but even the final scene, with Scotty finally getting on the radio, looks slightly soft and washed-out. Also, there are 3 or 4 unaccountable breaks in the film, where frames are missing.

1. Kenneth Tobey was always fine in small masculine bits in pictures, particularly one comedy scene in Hawks' I Was a Male War Bride. Hawks made two 'Winchester' pictures, this and The Big Sky, neither of which had superstar male leads. The Thing from Another World seems to have been conceived as an exploitation picture about a monster, the kind of thing a big star wouldn't get involved with anyway. As it was distributed by RKO, one can see Howard Hughes pushing his then-favorite leading man for 'small' movies, Charles McGraw, and being turned down. It's nice that Tobey got the part, as it makes the movie a true ensemble, instead of the typical setup of The Star backed by 20 'supporting players'.I think this made the story even more unpredictable for 1951 viewers - there's no absolute certainty that a leading player like Tobey isn't going to become a victim of the bloodsucking carrot. (The other angle that probably sold Hughes on helping make the film is of course the aviation angle. Those fliers act and talk 100% authentic.) Return

Russian composer Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979) was larger-than-life both for his showman-like personality and mammoth symphonic scores for epics like Land of the Pharaohs, Giant and The Fall of the Roman Empire. But his sense of theatricality also told him when to go \"small\" as well as \"large,\" as in the ballad \"Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling\" from High Noon. He wrote everything from the western staple \"Rawhide\" to the hysterical theremin horror score for The Thing From Another World. He had a knack for melody, for knowing his audience and wearing his heart on his sleeve. IMDB

Something terrifying is lurking in the subterranean basements beneath New York's Museum of Natural History in the first of many \"Pendergast books\" written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child! Turned into a feature film (that didn't quite do the source material justice) in 1997, The Relic is a fun thriller that sometimes flirts with being a pulp-detective novel, while offering up interesting food for thought on the topics of evolution and genetic manipulation. I found this book to be a real page-turner, and easily give it a recommendation, especially if you're a fan of the film! If you want to give it a read you can grab a copy HERE from Amazon.com!

It's all too easy to dissociate the films of the '50s from the post-Hiroshima terror from which they were born. Following the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945, there was a palpable sense of atomic dread running through the United States. The public did not understand the atomic bomb, only the destruction that it caused. Thus, as Oppenheimer's creation ushered in a new era of scientific expansion, it also bred a public distrust of the seemingly unnatural advances science was making all too feasible. This fear of scientific advancements on the homefront directly coincided with an increase in U.F.O. sightings, as the public grew paranoid about foreign invaders both from our world and not. These elements led Hawks directly to The Thing From Another World.

\"The Thing\" is basically, then, just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in \"The Thing.\" But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary. Because this material has been done before, and better, especially in the original \"The Thing\" and in \"Alien,\" there's no need to see this version unless you are interested in what the Thing might look like while starting from anonymous greasy organs extruding giant crab legs and transmuting itself into a dog. Amazingly, I'll bet that thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers are interested in seeing just that.

An alien crash-lands in the remote frozen regions of Earth. Revived by an unsuspecting team of scientists, it wreaks havoc on their research facility, threatening a small band of survivors during a fierce storm. Isolated from the outside world with their communications cut off, they must band together to defeat an uncommon foe that possesses abilities beyond anything they could imagine.

The Thing From Another World lands with a cracking good English DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono mix. This is a huge improvement in the dialogue department which I always thought sounded a bit soupy on the old DVD - especially during rapid-fire dialogue exchanges. It felt like I was hearing some of the sexually-charged banter for the first time! I can't count how many times I've seen this movie but I finally heard some really great jokes. Sound effects are well managed and provide a nice sense of atmosphere even through the narrow soundscape. Things get really creepy and unsettling when everyone is trying to be quiet and hide from the creature in the wood-floored corridors and their shoes scrape and scuff along the boards. To top things off, the theremin-heavy score by Dimitri Tiomkin sounds great and really kicks the mix where it counts.

That the threat comes from another planet acts as a cover. When a UFO is discovered buried in ice, men of a North Pole military base carelessly use thermite as a thawing agent. That sets off a chain of explosions, destroying the evidence. When the occupant is found, encased elsewhere in the ice, he thaws and escapes. The immediate response is to shoot.

The creature does step into the trap, where it is brutally electrocuted to the point of disintegration: The station and the world are saved by the menace from beyond the stars by a bunch of modern-day warriors wearing leather bomber jackets underneath their parkas.

A big part of these guesses involve whether the alien was provoked into its hostile reactions, or did it indeed intentionally come to Earth to introduce its species as the new dominant life form for our planet. We know for a fact that the humans were already splitting off into their own camps of thought from the moment they realized that the craft which crashed in the Arctic was no terrestrial airplane, not even something exotic from their chief Cold War rival.

Dr. Carrington betrays his own biases here. While he is likely the only human at the research station who does not want the alien either dead or at least sent somewhere very far away from them, the scientist also assumes that just because the being came to Earth in a technologically advanced spaceship, it is therefore morally and ethically superior as well, if such concepts can be applied to a species that evolved in a different manner on another world in another solar system.

Even when the airmen were first on their way to investigate the crashed flying craft, which they knew almost nothing about before finding it, their general consensus was that the vehicle was probably of Soviet origin. For Americans of the early Cold War era, this could mean little else than a potential threat to their nation, whether it was a spy plane