The Evolution of The Thing
75
suicide. In this sense, the group is certainly a courageous representative of
humanity, but the cultural message is that humanity is not strong enough to
overcome the crisis. The only victory can be Pyrrhic in spite of their heroism.
Blair returns, reverts to alien form, but is unable to prevent the
explosion that destroys the complex. At the end, only two crew members
remain, MacReady and Childs, who wandered off into the storm, thinking he
saw Blair, and therefore, may be contaminated. The whole complex is burning
away, and it is clear neither can survive. The film ends ambiguously, posing two
possibilities: MacReady will use the flame thrower to kill Childs to make sure; a
rescue crew will discover the corpses and relive the nightmare this crew has just
experienced if Childs is infected, possibly releasing the Thing on the world
population.
Clearly, this film takes a bleaker view of human prospects than either
of its predecessors. It is uncompromising in its statement that humanity is not
capable of defeating an implacable enemy, such as the negative impact of the
economy or the implacability of Islam. In fact, an alternative ending had been
filmed in which a rescue helicopter finds McRready and Childs, but it was never
shown to audiences.
For many years, a prequel to the 1982 film of The Thing has been in the
works. In the years leading to this project, the United States once again suffered
a huge crisis, the near Depre ssion of 2008, brought on by the bursting of the
housing bubble. This time, the outgoing President George W. Bush cooperated
with the incoming Obama administration to take active measures to prevent a
full scale Depression. Although a full blown Great Depression was averted, once
again huge numbers of Americans as well as the rest of the world, lost homes
and jobs because of the crisis. New President Obama tried to launch an activist
approach imitating FDR, but the negative fallout from the crisis hindered
initiatives such as health care reform and other progressive measures. The
Republican opposition coalesced into an obstructionist body leaving America in
a state of paralysis and promoting a crisis of confidence in government as a
solution to its citizens’ problems. Riding above these overwhelming crises,
Obama inherited the continuing War on Terror. Foreshadowed in some ways in
1979 through the Iran Hostage crisis, the attacks on the World Trade Center in
2001, had provoked the Bush administration to lash back against the Taliban and
A1 Quaeda, the heirs of the Ayatollah Khomeini now in the person of Osama
Bin Laden. This grinding conflict had sapped the money and energy of
Americans for longer than any foreign war. Also, the enemy became a faceless,
insidious entity which followed no rules of combat and had no regard for human
life. In this environment of negativity, the 1982 film gained even more
popularity as a cultural symbol.
The prequel to The Thing, 2011, (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.) takes us
back to the original encounter of the Norwegians with the alien as outlined in the
1982 movie which would be just a few weeks previous to the action of the
Carpenter film. At the beginning of the film, Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich