Written by Vickie
October 14, 2011
Meh.
That was kind of my overall reaction to this ambitious if not entirely successful remake of – excuse me, prequel to – the 1982 horror classic of the same name. Sure, there’s plenty of gore and jump-from-your-seat scares, but it lacks a certain depth and humanity that might have elevated it above standard-issue fright fare.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, clearly being shoved into an Ellen Ripley mold of some sort, is Kate Lloyd, a plucky paleontologist wrangled into an Antarctic gig by a somewhat self-important scientist (Ulrich Thomsen), who needs help extracting a “specimen” from a huge chunk of ice. Turns out that specimen is actually an enormous, and none-too-pleased, alien that wastes no time making mincemeat of the staff of the remote research station once its icy cocoon starts to thaw.
Cue: lots and lots of grotesque, bloody, slimy CGI work and decibel-busting audio effects that involve screams of assorted origin.
Thing is, the alien – which looks sort of like a humungous black grasshopper and is only ever seen in frenetically edited glimpses – doesn’t just kill its victims, it morphs into them. Clones them. Becomes them. That gives Kate the increasingly daunting and potentially fatal job of determining which of her colleagues are human and which ones are, literally, shells of their former selves.
While there’s enough tension and imminent danger to keep the proceedings from getting dull, there isn’t really enough meat to make the film really satisfying in a well-rounded way. The story is one-note and the characters are all completely two-dimensional, and all of the Norwegian scientists/experts are entirely interchangeable. I had no idea what any of their names were, so I just started mentally referring to them as “perpetually surprised guy,” “perpetually menacing guy” and the like… which was fitting since many of them seemed to wear the same respective facial expressions for the duration of their time onscreen.
The film is purportedly set in 1982 and, yet, I never would have guessed that were it not for the onscreen text telling me so right at the beginning. Everyone is styled in a surprisingly contemporary way – I’m pretty sure Kate is wearing low-rise jeans throughout and many of the guys’ haircuts are straight outta 2010 – and, save for some “old-fashioned” equipment (i.e., the lack of anything digital), there’s nothing particularly period-specific.
Lastly, the final 15 minutes of the otherwise easy-to-follow film are somewhat confusing – my movie-going pal and I had a “who’s on first?” type discussion immediately afterward as we tried to determine what actually happened and why. I’m not sure if that says more about us or the filmmakers, but it seemed like it shouldn’t have been necessary either way.
