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Summary: ONE OF THE BEST SCI-FI MOVIES OF ALL TIME!
Review: this movie is still one of the best sci-fi movies ever made,even by todays high tech movie standards.Filmed in 1951,"The Thing from another World" keeps you at the edge of your seat and is a pleasure to watch over and over again!
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Summary: What A Birthday Present !!!!
Review: With all due respect to John Carpenter`s re-make (a classic itself!),1951`s The Thing (From Another World) is simply the greatest sci-fi movie EVER made, end of discussion. It has it all, suspense, drama, comedy, and romance. The fact that ``The Thing`` is hardly ever seen in the movie adds to the build-up of suspense. The use of over-lapping dialogue makes it one of the few films that has actors talking and behaving like real people, instead of waiting for their next line. I`ve been a huge fan of this film since I was a kid, and it`s long overdue release on DVD on my 40th birthday was wonderful news indeed !!!!!
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Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: This film was in fact directed by Hawks, not Nyby. Ken Tobey is on record saying that Nyby only directed one shot of some people coming through a door and that it was the worst shot in the film. It's quite possibly Hawks' best work, which really is saying something. The use of overlapping dialogue has never been equaled. But most of all it's just fun. Spielberg, Crichton and Carpenter are all huge fans (Spielberg was interviewed about it for the AFI 100 Thrills List). Finally, all the folks who've been writing in saying that Carpenter's is the better film are missing the point. I love Carpenter's film, but I doubt anyone is a bigger fan of the original than Carpenter himself. He considers it a masterpiece of genre filmmaking. He's right.
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Summary: WOW!!, FINALLY ON DVD!!!
Review: I have been watching this movie at least once a month for the past ten years. I have the original black and white as well as the color version on vhs. This is the only sci-fi from the fifties era that has left an impression on me since viewing it as a child. The erie musical score and a great interplay of acting between the scientists and military personel do this movie great justice. Hopefully the DVD version will be a nice clear transfer?.
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Summary: Finally this Scifi "Original" on DVD
Review: This film ranks up there with such influential Scifi classics as it's full color contemporary masterpiece ," Forbidden Planet", and Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis".
A lot of the reasons have already been expressed in these other amazon reviews so I'll add a few not quite yet touched upon here. First and foremost is the truly eerie & thrilling atmospherics created by that incredible soundtrack ( by Dimitri Tiomkin )with one of the few truly appropirate uses of that pre-Moog electronic instrument ,Ye Olde Theramin , within a film studio orchestra. ( BTW: There was a film score compilation CD that included this score referred to as " The Thing from Another World " suite offered on amazon.com ,but is since listed as "unavailable"....really too bad ). This is certainly a case where the soundtrack is an active member of the script and crucial to the full experience.This score grabs you by the ears from the moment of those "can't be improved upon" opening credits and just leads along the rest of the journey and you just come right along willingly.
The filmmaking further builds upon the film technique of H.Hawks and brings the "Citizen Kane"-style cross-talk to SciFi story-telling ( shades of Orson Wells' " Wars of the Worlds" Halloween prank radio performance ). I used to listen , while doing homework or illustrating , to cassette audio tapes I'd made of the "The Thing" from TV and the story told works just by listening to it as "if" a radio theatre performance. That's how compelling the story ,the writing ,the character performances , and that soundtrack are. (Can't stress the importance of well-composed soundtracks enough which I now listen to as contemporary orchestral music when at work at my digital drawing board .
As far as being good solid science fiction:the new idea of an advanced being evolved from plant-life that then is discovered to possibly be on a mission of "harvesting" US was quite a unique twist. How they arrive at this theory is something I won't give away ,but , when they do just the end of the dialogue from one of the scientists to the lead scientist Dr. Carrington alone says it all :
" Arthur ,what if this thing didn't come to just visit the earth ,but conquer it....start growing some horrble army...turn the human race into food for it..." to which the sleep-deprived Dr. Carrington cuts him off by declaring ".....There are no enemies in sceince , doctor. , only phenomena to study .We are studying one."
Sorry , but it just don't get better'n that ,folks ,and that's only just past midway in the film.
Needless to day the culture-clash between scientists working on the extreme edge of military-supported science , by what had become the post-Manhattan Project preisthood class , being juxtopposed to the professionally "practical" soldier class is played to peffection and even takes on evermore ominousness looking back with 21st century hindsight. I mean the theme of the lurking fear of a genration fresh from winning a World War that was ended by a top secret technology inaugurating this wierd new "Cold War " with it twin "nuclear age" that was beyond anyone's but a higfhly select and secret few's comprehension is strikingly "there" in the film . Having faced down 2 "horrible armies" of Germany & Japan only to face 2 "new" ones from the U.S.S.R and ,then ,what was to be China & Korea in the Korean War, really suggests how close to home this select line reflect the fear of the times. This film can ,on a subliminal level now , rekindle an awareness of what was as genuine a fear during the then new "nuclear age" of the 50's as that cultural sense we all now share in this post-9/11 age.
Then throw in the tension of this new unknown enemy with
an even higher technology the scientists simply "must" understand in order to "use" it ( a reason why they hesitate to immediately "kill" the thing ) and add then throw in its "occupant" being as murderously efficient as anything these soldiers have experienced "as" soldiers in war makes for just too well tuned a plot to be missed. ( again , a multi-layered appreciation only from a 21st century 20/20 hindsight )
This adaption of "The Thing from Another World" needn't be "remade" because a well-enough adpation from this script treatment might just be too much to hope for. It's possible.
Perhaps something of a "little film" projetc that Peter Jackson says he'd like to do when he's recovered from the " LotR"cycle. Suffice it to say ,then ,that this DVD release immediately get's a resounding "'Bout damn time" rating ( another will be the ,as yet , unavailable docu on the making of "Apocalypse Now" ; "Hearts of Darkness" , but that's another review ).
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Summary: The release of this movie in 1951 . . .
Review: happened to coincide with a popular song with the exact same title. I woulda been ten years old. The quality of the song's lyrics rose to the same dizzy heights reached by other popular releases of that era. Examples included: The Purple People Eater; My Daddy was a Mummy; and The Man with the Weird Beard (immortalized by Arthur Godfrey.) My tiny mind said to me, "Johnny, the movie's a comedy." My mother warned me but she let me go anyway. Biiiiiiiiiig, big mistake. Old Thing-Fella soon had me [shaking] in my pants--the way he'd cast shadders on the wall and tear people apart, 'n all. And how could any scientist be mad enough to actually want to propagate those [people]? I was absolutely horrified by those rows and rows of little baby Things pulsating away in their trays, trying hard to get big, just like the Old Man. And then they were all gonna come after ME. Help! I didn't sleep for a month. To this very day I can still see The Thing clumping down that inescapable, narrow passageway straight at me. That big ol'
Thang got fried to a crisp right before my eyes! I was saved!!(but only just) Wow.
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Summary: The Thing is the King
Review: Want to be scared? Turn off the lights, crank up the DVD player,pop in the thing and hang on tight. Alien vs. humans north pole ,dark and cold. That's a recipe for a great film. It's wonderfull in its simplicity. My uncle John told me about this movie when I was eight.I loved it then,fourty three years later I can hardly wait.... When the DVD arrives, "WATCH THE SKIES."
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Summary: Back when flying saucers roamed the earth . . .
Review: This is a great movie. The earlier reviews do a nice job of summarizing the plot and characters, and the isolated world of this little Arctic base really does capture the viewer's interest, however implausible the notion of the world under attack by a giant vegetable. What makes this film especially enjoyable is the interplay between the characters, who represent the classic sci-fi melange of a brave military officer, his irreverent but loyal crew, intellectuals and scientists devoted to the pursuit of knowledge even when it places the whole group in danger, and of course, a very smart and beautiful woman who serves coffee because she decides she wants to, not because it's just the thing that the woman is supposed to do. Combine a solid cast with a fast-paced dialogue, and a great visual experience, and you have an entertaining movie that works. Apparently it wasn't much of a hit when it was first released at the height of Cold War tension in 1951, when the Korean War was still raging and people were still talking about flying saucers after the 1947 Roswell incident (whatever THAT was all about!), but it stands up very well 50 years later, especially when it is compared to some of the other sci-fi films of that period (and no, I won't bring up "Robot Monster" here). Great film; break out the popcorn and soda and have fun!
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Summary: Had this one for years
Review: One reviewer echoed my sentiments when they said they'd "buy it in a heatbeat" if it were on DVD. I have a VHS version, but I'd be glad for this one on DVD. Another reviewer seemed a bit upset at "the constant habit the director/writer had of making these characters talk over the top of one another." Uh...that was the whole point of how the dialogue was orchestrated. Real people talk over one another like that. In fact, this is one of the most realistic movies for how people talk in groups that I have ever seen.
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Summary: Possibly the best SF film ever made
Review: At least, that is Michael Crichton's opinion. I can definitely say it is one of the top four or five and probably the best of the 1950s along with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Them! This is a more conventional story by today's standards but the film plays so well you can literally rewind it and watch it again without a pause, and the film seems better every time. Touching upon all the themes that became cliches, the military heroics, the arrogance of the scientists, the light romance, the quirky monster (this one is actually more like a vegetable fresh from your grocer's freezer) that drinks blood, and so on. Not a moment of screen time is wasted and the acting is first rate, no doubt due to the direction(?) of H. Hawks. Don't miss this one - and demand the finest DVD possible, wherever it may be.
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