What’s up with this Thing?

Walking into the screening for The Thing, a prequel to the beloved 1983 John Carpenter film, you’d expect to witness a crowd-pleasing scary movie with terrifying special effects. But The Thing ends up just as generic as its title.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as a scientist who is asked, seemingly out of the blue, to drop everything she’s doing and go on a mysterious expedition to Antarctica to dig up some mysterious discovery. Now, I would assume that the decision to just pack up and go halfway across the world would not be taken lightly, but Winstead makes the decision in about 10 seconds. No explanation. No buildup. It’s like the film is telling us, “Listen, I know this seems stupid, but the faster she agrees to go, the sooner we can get to the alien goregasm that you all want to see anyway, so just deal.”
Once she gets to the Arctic base camp, she has to coexist with some Norwegian explorers, American pilots, and the blonde guy from Fired Up, all of whom contribute little to the story. They soon find out that they are excavating the remains of a crashed space ship and the frozen remains of an alien.
Despite making what would seem to be the greatest discovery in the history mankind, there is little awe or terror in the eyes of the characters. The actors are firm in their commitment to maintaining their stern, Scandinavian dispositions.
Once the obligatory five seconds of sweeping orchestral music is pumped in to simulate anxiety, the alien creature is brought back to life, escapes, and goes on a kill-fest.  Rinse and repeat for an hour, and by the end, it’s up to Winstead to beat the Thing to death using the flamethrower she somehow learned to use as a lab-bound scientist.
It’s tough to see a remake or a prequel without a comparing it to the original. John Carpenter’s version of The Thing, though itself a remake, was truly terrifying. Without CGI, practical effects were used to create disgusting disintegrations and alien transformation sequences. While this version features some cool effects, most of the CGI loses the realism and creepiness of Carpenter’s film.
This reboot also fails to deliver on Carpenter’s themes of building paranoia among the survivors. Since the Thing can copy anyone’s identity, everyone is a suspect. But the new movie treats this as a peripheral theme, letting chaotic violence take center stage.
The Thing really doesn’t work as even normal popcorn fun. It’s too derivative and uninteresting, and the computer effects leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, it’s another example of Hollywood studio execs trying vainly to recapture the appeal of a classic instead of producing something original. How many awful remakes have to happen before everyone realizes it’s best to leave good enough alone?