When Special Effects Don't Hold Up (Re: The Thing)

[NDX]

Rewatching John Carpenter's 1982 'The Thing': When special effects don't hold up

Or How I Spent the Afternoon Wasting Everyone's Time Talking Out My Ass.

www.ew.com/article/2011/10/18/when-special-effects-dont-hold-up

By Owen Gleiberman

This, this right here, got me aggravated.

That said, the real problem I had watching The Thing a second time is that the special effects, much as I’d originally found them awesome, now looked fake. (Sorry, fellow fans, but that’s the only word that seems apt.) The thing is: Why? As a critic, I’ve routinely decried the overuse of CGI, the too-smooth quasi-unreality of digital effects. I have always stood up for the powers of analog. Yet had my eye, in the ensuing years, grown accustomed, or even unconsciously addicted, to the too-easy virtuosity of CGI? Bottin’s baroque nightmare ultra-contraptions, beginning with a Siberian Husky whose face splits open, now looked transparently like the cleverly rigged machines they were. I could still appreciate what a prodigious imagination he had, but no matter how hard I tried to sit back and enjoy the grotesque ride, I could see the artifice. Everything looked wet – too wet. At the time, this was a novelty, a way of lending an organic ickiness to the kind of body-part horror that used to be done with overly pristine rubbery synthetics. But the novelty hadn’t aged well; everything was so moist it looked freshly painted. And don’t get me started on the goo! This was another innovation of the era, dating back to Alien, with its milky translucent gunk dripping out of sexualized membranes. But in The Thing, everything was slathered in goo. I practically expected to look to the side and see a big vat of it marked with something like “Acme Internal Organ Spunk.” It was, quite simply, too much of a good gross thing.

Yeah, this is just wrong.  The Thing's SFX is one of the few effects that still hold up today and surpasses the use of CGI in most modern films.  And this is not nostalgia speaking, this is an artist speaking.  The visceral feel of the practical effects in the film bring to life more than any computer generated alien can.  Can computers create amazing imagery?  Oh god yes.  But does it beat something real, that you can actually touch?  NOPE!  And that goes for The Thing.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few items there that could benefit from a facelift of being 33 years old.  Like he stop motion scene.  It was rough then, but then again stop motion has a feel all its own while, not organic feeling, lets your imagination soar.  But, yes, you can tell it's stop motion and only fits in certain settings now.  Such as animated films like Paranorman or Box Trolls (which look amazing and take full advantage of the medium).  Or the spider head, where the legs barely move but the head scurries away nonetheless.  These could be done proper with the right mix of CGI and practical FX.

I recently watched Iron Man from 2008 and Avengers: Age of Ultron from... 2 weeks ago.  Iron Man's CGI suit looks and moves so much differently today.  While the practical FX can hold up for decades, CGI can't even last 1.  That hurts more, to me, than seeing a string pull a fake head away from a body 33 years later. 

Am I alone in this?  I hope I'm not alone in this way of thinking.

[endo]

I think the effects were very well done and still hold up. I mean, yeah you can see how some of them were done, and gorepolice has said on BD it's even more obvious. I haven't seen it on BD, but I can imagine. Even so, I'd rather have them practical than be CGI.
Another good example is American Werewolf in London. Could that have been better using CGI? I honestly don't think so.
To me, The Thing having all practical effects is what makes it so endearing. So many horror movies today get all muddled together because none separate themselves from each other. The Thing, for the time, took it to a new level, and it still looks as awesome to me today as when I saw it in the theater back in '82.

[james]

THE THING is pretty much perfect, IMO. This guy's effin' crazy.

[gorepolice]

This guy is an idiot. The effects still look great today. I think so, and everyone I know who loves this movie thinks so too. I mean, there are films where the effects look really bad now, but this is not one of them. Dated CGI looks a billion times worse to me than even the most obvious practical effect.

[james]

Amen on all counts, GP!

[NDX]

Wow, I seemed much smarter 4 years ago when it came to writing. Now I'm lucky to get past 2 sentences.