[Nick Zwar]

For me, the most interesting aspect of THE THING, and that’s why I love watching it, is one of the very few movies with an actually “alien” lifeform, one the protagonists struggle to comprehend because they are trying to survive.
There is a terrific science fiction story by Peter Watts which tells the Carpenter movie from the point of view of THE THING (which is often just as puzzled and frightened as the people). This is a perspective I have always found interesting from the first time I watched the movie. It’s an obviously intelligent alien, but one that’s so different from us, it can no more communicate with us than we could with it… an intelligent “bio mass” (which, in the story exploration by Watts, gets more intelligent when it absorbs more mass, and is less intelligent when it’s just a few cells). This “Thing” was really an alien intelligence. That’s my favorite aspect of the movie, the truly “alien alien”.