Chris Dragan's Corner

A post in a new category – movie reviews. Hopefully everyone’s favorite. 🙂 This new category will in fact be not only about reviews, but also about my commentary.

The Thing is a movie about an alien lifeform which crash-landed on Earth in Antarctica long ago. It’s actually a prequel to John Carpenter’s original movie from 1982 with the same title.

If you like movies about evil aliens like I do, you would certainly like this one. The prequel blends very well with the original movie, in fact it at the end it is surprisingly well connected to the original. They did not overdo the monsters but made them more believable using current technology. There is a lot of action in it, boring scenes were kept to a minimum to sustain the story. Definitely worth watching if you like thrillers, action and aliens.

Spoilers

The lifeform in the movie is bloodthirsty, but it does not only want to just consume Earth’s lifeforms. When the organism catches and swallows a dog or a human, or even if it only sprinkles one with its fluids, the alien cells attack prey’s cells and convert them into alien cells.

It wasn’t said in the movie, but one can suspect the alien lifeform attacked some other intelligent aliens who had a spaceship and this way came into the possession of that spaceship, which it used to come to Earth. This could potentially explain why a graceful landing would be too hard for that creature.

What does not make much sense is how such lifeform with the ability to understand and pretend other lifeforms from other planets could evolve in the first place. All lifeforms are bound to their environment. They are used to pressure and chemical composition of that environment. Advanced organisms don’t have the flexibility to live in environments beyond their home, because they are too complex for that. I find it hardly believable that a species from another planet could come to Earth and breathe our air, eat our meat, let alone have the ability to change itself into one of us in a matter of minutes.

However there is one scenario in which such a life form could be possible – if it was deliberately created as a weapon or even just as a crazy experiment.

But even if such a lifeform existed, I still find it quite improbable that it could find another alien with spaceship technology who it could mimic. I would argue, that civilisations able to travel in space to other planets must have evolved beyond physical limitations of biological life and consist of cybernetic beings, which we today consider as “robots” or “androids” etc. For this reason I think that even if such a creature existed, it wouldn’t be able to spread effectively to other planets.