User:Jgjuleg

•	John Carpenter’s The Thing, features a hero, or drunken anti-hero, named MacReady and opens on an American Research Base at the South Pole with a small winter crew of twelve men. •	The role of women in Carpenter’s film is consigned to that of “monstrous other”[5] in the form of machines and the reproductive nature and images of the “thing.” •	The film begins as the normality of American base is disturbed by a commotion caused by two apparently insane Norwegians chasing a lone dog across the snow. •	One of the Norwegians is unsuccessfully trying to shoot the dog, which is running toward the American base. •	The hapless Norwegian then tries to blow up the dog with a grenade, which slips out of his hand and destroys him and his helicopter. •	Meanwhile the other Norwegian accidentally shoots one of the Americans in the leg and the Americans’ Commander shoots the Norwegian dead. •	Bewildered by the Norwegians behaviour, MacReady an ex-Army helicopter pilot and the camp Doctor, Copper, fly out, to check on Norwegian camp. •	MacReady and Copper find the camp ravaged with every living being apparently dead. The two gather some notes, video tapes, and the charred carcass of something terrible, which they take back to their base. •	Blair, a biologist, who parallels the same character in Who Goes there?, performs an autopsy on the charred carcass. •	That night after the Norwegian dog is put in the kennel, it transforms into a terrible tentacled creature that sprays the other dogs with a corrosive digestive acid and begins transforming. MacReady raises the station alarm and the men destroy the dog/thing with a flamethrower, a weapon featured in Campbell’s story.

•	Blair then performs an autopsy on this creature, after which he determines that their winter base is now host to an insidious creature that uses stealth to infect and replicate other life forms. This revelation intrigues him causing Blair to investigate the nature of the creature at a microscopic or molecular level. •	Blair explains, “What we have here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates them perfectly.” [6] •	He concludes that no one can be trusted because the creature by now could have replicated any of the team. •	After revealing this key information, like his parallel character in Campbell’s story, the biologist goes insane. The others then lock him in a separate hut, away from the main building. •	The violent manifestations by the “thing” are increasing along with paranoia so MacReady takes charge and threatens to terminate anyone who will not submit to a blood test, which like the one in the Campbell short story, uses blood and a piece of hot wire to determine who can be trusted. •	Everyone who is revealed by the test to be a “thing” is destroyed with a flamethrower. •	As do the survivors in Campbell’s story, the remaining men set out to test, Blair, who they find has been busy building an alien machine, which they promptly destroy. •	By this time in the film, Blair has become an immense monstrous “thing,” which contains and exudes the various manifestations the “thing” has ingested throughout its existence. •	There is a final battle between the surviving men and the massive “Blair” creature whereby the remaining humans raze the base to the ground, forfeiting their lives in order to destroy the “thing.” •	The film concludes with MacReady and one other survivor, Childs, neither of whom is sure the other is human, getting drunk, while facing the thought of freezing to death. •	Unlike either of its precursors, which end with a triumphant hero and humanity overcoming the alien other, the conclusion of Carpenter’s film is pessimistic and ambiguous.