Comments on: CSI Antarctica https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica Lollards in the high church of low culture Mon, 10 Nov 2014 02:02:40 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: swanstep https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-956670 Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:32:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-956670 Interesting/depressing interview with The Thing (2011)’s screenwriter here. Although there could well be some self-serving blame-passing going on, it reads to me like a credible case-study of how film studio heavy-handness at every level turns competent film-making into incompetent: reject slow-build-up plots out of hand, force ‘preview audiences get the final cut’-driven reshoots, ensure sequelizability…. One bright spot: it sounds like enough stuff was filmed only to be rejected by the Studio that a radically different ‘Director’s Cut’ might emerge at some point.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-947179 Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:33:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-947179 also: The shredded clothes were a misdirection, though — weren’t they? ie possibly the specific red-herring tactic of a Thing-with-a-men’s-evil-brain (Thing-Blair?)

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-947176 Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:27:26 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-947176 There’s a small bit of illogic in the Campbell original, come to think of it: Campbell’s Thing has a certain amount of telepathic capability (it broadcasts daunting ideas of what it can do into sleeping human minds), but cannot deploy this telepathy to demand that a blood-test swab of Thing bravely takes one for the team. So the mind-reading functions as cross-species leakage but NOT intra-species tactical planning.

The theory behind the blood test is that every mote of Thing is its own self-protecting organism, and that individual survival (esp of a Thing-mote w/o a brain at all) will trump collective lay-low strategy. If indeed Things can achieve collective strategy, or EVEN RECOGNISE OTHER THINGS (“Get yr tentacles off of me you big THING, it’s just me”)

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By: Elisha Sessions https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-947164 Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:04:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-947164 But only when provoked! It plays its cards very close to its glistening vest unless being prodded with a hot wire or being surgeried open by a doctor with a nose ring. It tries to keep its machinations out of view, so you get this battle-of-wits whodunit vibe. But this one just launches itself around all over the place, harum-scarum

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By: thefatgit https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946704 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:30:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946704 IIRC, the actual thing/man (1982) was a bit DILLIGAF during the blood test.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946660 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:54:42 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946660 *prepares blood test*

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By: DietMondrian https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946656 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:44:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946656 #9 – Good lord, I didn’t mean to sound so nihilistic. I’m actually a cheerful soul.

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By: DietMondrian https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946654 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:40:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946654 Vehicles to enable our DNA to replicate – that’s all we are.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946621 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:10:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946621 In the original Campbell story — which is a hecatomb compared to the films, they execute like a dozen thing-people — someone says, mournfully, “I miss Blair. I’d almost even prefer having a thing-Blair back.” The eerie and unnerving element about the piggyback-type thing is that it will dump its entire Blair-brains without a second thought to become a seagull winging it to more flesh to mimic. The detail of the imitation — the wisdom taken in — means nothing to it in its onward parasite flight; it can perfectly reproduce what we value most deeply, but because the reproduction comes so easily to it, it values it not at all.

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By: Ed https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946455 Thu, 01 Dec 2011 05:36:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946455 “It didn’t build the spaceship”…. like the alien in ‘Alien’, which was also a parasite in someone else’s craft.

I’m not sure why, but that makes it more eerie, somehow. Perhaps it’s the intimation that the universe is thronged by a Cthulhu-esque proliferation of creatures unknown to us.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946178 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:08:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946178 On the ilx thread we were discussing how smart Carpenter’s Thing actually is: forget whose point it was — might have been mine — that it’s presumably only as smart as the brain in the body it’s mimicking.

(ie it didn’t build the spaceship, it piggybacked a ride on the ship-builders)

(there’s not much point going into this all NO SPOILERS, is there?)

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By: Elisha Sessions https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946174 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:03:10 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946174 Actually now I think about it there’s another big break with the 1982 version – how the Thing itself behaves. In Carpenter’s movie it’s very secretive (as befits a sexual act).. leading to all sorts of mysteries. It only reveals itself against its will. In this one it comes right and and gets ya, no qualms about it

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By: Elisha Sessions https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946154 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:34:30 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946154 I just think if you’re going to make such a huge break with the previous movie, to whose structure you’re otherwise slavishly devoted, spin it out into something less boring than “one girl against The Man, maaaaan”.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946075 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:23:54 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946075 (“You BITCH” is in Aliens, which pedals to the metal on girl-on-girl stuff that Alien somewhat downplayed — or anyway excised from the first released version)

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By: Elisha Sessions https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-946043 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:07:33 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-946043 I dunno, I’m pretty on board with Berlatsky’s interpretation of the all-male cast. It does more than just dispense with romantic sub-plots, it ensures the only “Other” is the Thing. In Alien there is something about Ripley that allows her to confront the Alien on something like an equal footing. They’re both women! (The most iconic moment of the whole movie: “You BITCH!” Or is that in Aliens?) It works for Alien, because the whole series of movies really turns out to be the story of Ripley and her survival. But The Thing’s about a group: which one of us is NOT “us”? In The Thing 2011, the answer is obvious! It’s Winstead! Nobody knows who the hell she is, she’s female, she’s American, she’s significantly younger. The group trust issues are clouded by all this. The feeling of species kinship so keenly felt in the earlier versions – Us against It – is diffused. It’s She against Them against It. Against Them. Against She. Eventually it just turns into a Final Girl movie:

The character in question tends to follow a certain set of characteristics. The most obvious one is being (almost) Always Female. She’ll also almost certainly be a virgin, avoiding Death by Sex, and probably won’t drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or take drugs, either. Finally, she’ll probably turn out to be more intelligent and resourceful than the other victims, occasionally even evolving into a type of Action Girl by the movie’s end. Looking at the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality, you could say that the Final Girl is a combination of The Hero, The Cutie and the Distressed Damsel – which obviously gives her a very low deadness score. The Final Girl is usually but not always brunette, often in contrast to a promiscuous blonde who traditionally gets killed off.

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By: swanstep https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/11/csi-antarctica/comment-page-1#comment-945891 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:47:21 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22282#comment-945891 That ‘Fecund Horror’ essay seems interesting (I’ve only read its The Thing section), but, good lord, the harping on the idea that there has to be some deep explanation of/meaning behind the all-male-ness of the cast of The Thing (1982) gets tiresome. The author refuses to take the s/writer’s preference just to avoid romantic sub-plots (that he’d vaguely felt as a kid had weakened earlier horrors/monster movies) at face value, and seems blind to the force of one his own ideas: that The Thing (1982) could *easily* have had Ripley- and Lambert-figures a la Alien. Almost nothing would have to have been changed had that been so, the film’s robust that way, hence – the obvious conclusion – no interpretation of The Thing (1982) that turns on sex-specifics can matter or be importantly correct. (Cultural studies/interpretations really needs something like significance testing or base rates calculation included into its methodology.)

BTW, agree that The Thing (1982)’s blood test is a bit silly as stated (although I don’t think it’s *that* fanciful for McCready to conclude that a super-shape-changing critter must be *extremely* decentralized in its vital capacities etc.). Of course, for the Thing to have such remarkable imitative/shape-changing/survival powers there must be plenty of detectable bodily mechanics and fluid differences in its finished product. A Thing/final stage *can’t* be just like one of us all the way down (cf. testing replicants cognitively might work, but if they’re as physically superior-but-also-time-limited as they are supposed to be, then all that has to show up in their bodily mechanics/fluids etc.). One way of understanding the blood test that’s devised is therefore just as a very dramatic/thematically powerful stand-in for most-likely, efficacious procedure (similarly for Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampf test).

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