a review of 怪形前传

ℍ𝕆𝕆ℙ𝕋𝕆𝔹𝔼ℝ 𝔼𝕃𝔼𝕍𝔼ℕ ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋 𝔽𝕆𝕌ℝ: Skipped out on this one back in 2011, but catching up with it now it actually makes for a pretty decent companion to Carpenter's film, although it doesn't really add up to much beyond "Oh hey, remember that Norwegian base? This is what happened there." At times, it feels more like a remake (or even the legasequel this maybe should have been) rather than a prequel, albeit with a much less colorful and varied cast outside of Winstead and Edgerton, who are both pretty great and memorable. We get a couple of decent moments with LOST's Adewale Akuinnoye-Agbaje and GAME OF THRONES' Kristofer Hivju as part of the ensemble, but otherwise the rest of the Norwegian crew is kind of interchangeable. The digital effects used to create the various mutated Thing-spawned creatures (the subject of a lot of irritation among online film nerds at the time) aren't actually half bad, but at the same time I lament the loss of the practical effects that apparently were shot for this film and subsequently replaced with CGI at additional expense. The ending goes to great pains to match up with the beginning of THING '82, but mostly it just underlines how much Winstead/Edgerton's big third-act adventure DOES NOT MATTER to what happens in that movie, with a couple of Norwegian characters that I frankly forgot were even still alive (the movie certainly doesn't care about them until that moment) suddenly reappear just in time to hit their predestined marks.