By the looks of its first trailer and subsequent commercials, The Thing (opening in theaters tomorrow) seems like nothing more than an obvious remake of director John Carpenter’s sci-fi/horror masterpiece of the same title. The original, starring a badass Kurt Russell as one of several men fighting against an alien presence that emulates human hosts, was itself a loose remake of the 1951 classic The Thing From Another World, though Carpenter’s film honors the original novella, John W. Campbell Jr.’s Who Goes There? more closely than it does Howard Hawks’ ’51 flick. But all of that is to say that the proposition of yet another Thing rehash is enough to shatter the hearts of any monster movie purist.
