The Thing(s): 86 Years of Watching the Skies

The major streaming services' suggestion algorithms already know too much. I knew this the moment I logged into Netflix and it had labelled "dark Scandinavian suspense thrillers" as one of my favorite genres -not only specific, but right on the money. It couldn't be anymore specific unless it had been, "dark science fiction thrillers that take place on remote polar research bases." If it's about Antarctica or sci-fi, I'm watching it; if it's got both, it's an instant favorite. And the best example of the genre is undoubtedly The Thing, or more appropriately, The Things since there have been at least three major cinematic adaptations of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella "Who Goes There?", where "The Thing" makes its first terrifying appearance in literature. 

Campbell's story, originally titled "Frozen Hell," follows the researchers and crew of an Antarctic research station who stumble upon a crashed alien spaceship frozen under the ice. They recover a presumably dead alien body from the craft. They take the frozen specimen back to base for an examination, as any curious scientist would, and terror ensues. As a piece of sci-fi literature, it was an early example of the Golden Era of Sci-fi, from the 1930's through the 1950's, which spawned a variety of famous sci-fi books, television series and radio shows, and often prompted UFO hysteria, both real and imagined. Some sci-fi works, like Star Trek focused on the wonders of the beyond, and the shining possibilities of a space-traveling future; others, like "Who Goes There?" fall into the category I like to call "don't go to space." 

The first film adaptation of Campbell's story premiered in 1951 as The Thing from Another World. It's kind of cheesy by today's standards, but is actually quite a bit more entertaining than a lot of the sci-fi films of the day. It combines snappy dialogue with a continuous level of suspense without a lot of unnecessary filler. Parts of the film, shot at Glacier National Park in Montana are visually beautiful even in black and white. They help to capture some of the isolated vastness Campbell may have been going for in "Who Goes There?".  

At first, The Thing from Another World follows the same premise of Campbell's story, except the research base in Antarctica is replaced by an Air Force base in northern Alaska. Aviators from the base are called out to investigate a crashed object. They find a frozen alien, just like in the book. Once they return back to base with the alien encased in a frozen ice block, the terror begins. This is where, I think, The Thing From Another World begins to fall short... 

The airmen, civilian scientists and one journalist, grab guns, form a posse, hunt down and kill the alien, which turns out to be a giant vegetable (seriously!). 

There are other non-plot related criticisms as well. The first is that the one thinking intellectual in the crew of macho-man-alien-hunters, Dr. Arthur Carrington played by Robert Cornthwaite is portrayed as an effeminate weirdo who wants to (gasp!) communicate and (double gasp!!) learn from the alien, before killing it. He tries to do so, and gets immediately crushed on queue, making way for the capable heroes of the US military to save the day. Also, the only female cast member (the scientist's assistant), played by Margaret Sheridan, has very few lines, the longest of which is to suggest that a vegetable can be killed "lots of ways," by broiling it, grilling it, steaming it, etc.

But let's not get too intellectual. This pulpy flick isn't meant to be a thought-provoking piece of weighty philosophy; it's about a SPACE MONSTER after all. The real fault in Thing From Another World isn't the 1950's sexism, or the thinly veiled, Cold War-era, anti-intellectual McCarthyism (all movies from that time had some of that, especially the sci-fi ones). It's that it took away The Thing's most terrifying feature, its ability to shape-shift into any human it comes in contact with, and hide in plane sight until it's time to kill.

The Thing, the second cinematic adaptation of "Who Goes There?," premiered in 1982. Directed by legendary horror and sci-fi director, John Carpenter, and starring a great cross-generational cast including Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Donald Moffat and Keith David, was neither a commercial success or failure, and it was panned by early critics as grotesque, nihilistic and boring. However, The Thing grew to be a cult classic, and in my opinion, a sci-fi horror on-par with Ridley Scott's Alien. 

The first scene capitalizes on the source material's setting with breathtaking areal shots of the white "Antarctic" wilderness (though the filming took place in Juneau, Alaska). A helicopter with "NORGE" (Norway) painted on it tracks a stray sled dog across the ice. We see one pilot manning the chopper, and another load a rifle and take aim from the aircraft as it approaches the galloping husky. A simple, but suspenseful monotone bass score, by composer Ennio Morricone, booms as the airborne hunters try once, and again to put the desperate dog down. The scene, with no dialogue and no prologue, brilliantly captures a “what-the-fuck is happening?” feel that entices viewers to stay seated to find out what is in store. Where-the-fuck are we? Who-the-fuck are they? and Why-the-fuck are they shooting at an innocent animal? Before the Norwegian hunters can stop their prey, it finds shelter at a structure, US Outpost 31.  

Conflict ensues when the American crew of Outpost 31 defends the seemingly innocent animal. The Norwegians, desperate to kill the dog, fire toward the American defenders. Gary (Moffat), the armed commander of the Americans fires from behind a window and kills the apparently crazed Norwegians. 

"First goddamn day of winter," says R.J. MacReady (Russell), the American chopper pilot for the station.

Not long after Outpost 31 loses contact with the outside world amidst an incoming blizzard (because of course), the crew finds out why these Norwegians did not want that dog to escape. It was no dog at all, but a creature, something horrendous. Once locked in the shelter with the other sled dogs, it reveals its gruesome form, digesting the terrified animals one-by-one with its array of tentacles. Members of the crew are there to witness the attack and kill the hideous thing before it can get away, but the danger remains... if The Thing can imitate a dog perfectly, it can imitate a human. The dog has been walking freely around the outpost since it was rescued; it could have eaten any member of the crew, and still be hiding among them. No one could be trusted. 

Just like in the original story, the Scientist, Blair (Brimley) is the first to crack from the terror. Or, maybe, he just saw the writing on the wall before anyone else did: The Thing could not be allowed to leave, and neither could anyone else. If it made it to a populated area, it will begin to eat and imitate everyone on earth, no one would be prepared, no one would see it coming. Before he's subdued by the rest or the crew, the frantic scientist destroys the radio equipment further isolating Outpost 31 from any rescue. From that point forward, with no way to tell who is real and who is an alien imposter, the crew's worst enemies are themselves. One after another, a crew mate deemed to be "infected", a talking, begging, desperate copy of someone who used to be friend, is shot to death or burned alive by the humans left on the station. The surviving crew's trust in one another fades as their fear rises. Soon, it's every man for himself, as no one really knows who the real Thing is anymore. "Frozen Hell" indeed. 

Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing, has some dated special effects and admittedly has its dry spells, where suspense turns to boredom. But, for the most part, it really captures the vast loneliness of Antarctica with the intimate claustrophobic nature of the base. With nowhere to run, and no one to call for help, the crew of Outpost 31 may have well been on a spaceship, with an Alien crawling around in the ventilation shafts. It's sci-fi horror at it's finest. 

The Thing (1982) has certainly outlasted early criticism, remaining a pop-culture phenomenon to this day. A fairly good prequel based on Carpenter's 1982 film was released in 2011, staring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton. And, most notably, the online video game sensation Among Us, based on the premise of an alien imposter infiltrating a space crew debuted in 2018, and it soon had a cooped-up COVID-weary public on their phones, PC's and Nintendo Switches trying to guess which player was the "imposter", spacing many an innocent teammate in the process. In fact, The Thing is screened every year by the real-life crew of the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station at the beginning of Antarctic Winter. Scientists have weird sense of humor. 

John Carpenter clearly knew what he was doing when he picked up this screenplay adapted from that early Novella called "Who Goes There?". The themes of The Thing are timeless, they transcend the sci-fi gerne all together, eliciting even the classic transcendental literature of writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Henry James. It may say more about the dangers of humans, than any space monster. Like Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," or the phantasm in James' "The Turn of The Screw," we could easily dismiss any survivor's account of coming in contact with The Thing as a paranoid delusion, an insane fantasy, the natural result of being cooped-up and isolated on a remote polar research base where the sun doesn't rise for a month. Furthermore, we could look at The Thing as a reflection of post-modern society. With misinformation filling the airwaves, claims of "fake news" being spewed out by all sides of the political spectrum, artificial intelligence mimicking human interaction, and sometimes even humans themselves, a shapeshifting demon seems like an apt metaphor for the times. Heck, if a malicious adversary wanted to create chaos, they need only convince their enemy that A Thing is among them, and watch as paranoia and fear tear them apart from within. Perhaps this has already been tried.

The 1951 film, The Thing From Another World, may have fallen short of the mark when compared to Carpenter's 1982 remake but it does have a memorable quote at the end. After the alien is defeated, the journalist, "Scotty" (played by Douglas Spencer), who witnessed the battle, addresses the public by radio... 

"And now before giving you the details of the battle, I bring you a warning: Everyone of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies." Maybe he should have added, keep watching each other too. Anyone, anywhere could be The Thing.  

Campbell, John W.  "Who Goes There?" in Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. Street & Smith, Publications, Inc. 1938.

Nyby, Christian. The Thing From Another World. Winchester Pictures Corporation, Los Angeles, California. 1951. 

Carpenter, John. The Thing, Universal Pictures, Los, Angeles California. 1982.  

The Next Generation: A Lesson in Leadership

The Cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation

I was originally going to title this article "Stark Trek," but given my fondness for The Next Generation crew, I decided to give "TNG" the nod... 

No offense to Captain James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner), Inter Stellar Linguist, Lieutenant Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) and, of course, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (Played by James Doohan). 

Like most Millennials, I remember, Lieutenant Commander Data, Lieutenant Commander Worf, and -of course- Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I actually checked out more than a few VHS video-taped episodes of that series from the Kent Free Library when I was a kid.

There is so much I've learned from this show. Everything from reading and literature to gambling. Never bet against Data, by the way.

 

 Also, don't bet against Dr. Pulaski either.

 

 

As you can see from the brilliant writing and casting, chiefly from Commander Data, a robot (but very-with human qualities), played by Brent Spiner, Commander Riker (played by Jonathan Frakes), and Dr. Pulaski (played by Diana Muldaur), the show is not simply space battles with aliens. It actually includes some funny and "educational" dialogue. 

 

In an era where we are all struggling to deal with others, unlike ourselves, it's good to see a diverse group of crewmen who are very different to one another. Data, as you can see, in the videos above, is very different (he's a robot). 

 

But, as you watch the show, you'll see the normal cast of differing characters match wits. In each episode the galaxy-class Starship Enterprise will encounter "weird" or "different" aliens from another planet, and sometimes they're hostile. 

 

It's up to Captain Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) to communicate and try to work with each species his ship encounters in a (hopefully) non-violent way. Naturally, the Starship Enterprise is equipped with weapons and torpedoes in-case things really go south. However, most episodes in the series end peacefully. 

 

But, most of all, I like the crew, and their relationships. Starting with Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge (played by LeVar Burton), who is a bit of a folk-hero among Millennials, for being both a Star Trek officer and reading expert, and ending with Lieutenant Commander Worf (played by Michael Dorn). 

 

Both actors portray differences and diversity on the ship's crew. Worf is a Klingon. Obviously, He looks noticeably different; but, his crew-mates treat him with respect and honor. Worf is a good officer to have on the bridge of a ship where decisions can be critical and life saving. Worf's captain and crew knows this. 

 

Geordi La Forge is an expert engineer, but he's blind. In our day-and-age, we might call his condition a "disability", but, in Geordi's case, he's able to use technology to see. In fact, he's really not blind at all! He can see electro-magnetic waves and sub-atomic particles that "normal" people can't.  

To conclude, I'd like to mention Captain Picard's leadership. While he can be honest at times, he's a ship's captain and must be responsible for his crew, and I guess the protector of the entire Galaxy. Sometimes he needs to be harsh, and provide criticism to his subordinates. But, in doing so, he never breaches their trust and is always a friend when needed...  

Just like Worf is to "Spot", the cat...  

 

 

 

 

Gene Roddenberry, "Star Trek: The Next Generation",  Paramount Domestic Television, Inc. 2012. 

Integrations

Last week I reviewed the 1987 film "Robocop" about a futuristic policeman augmented with super-human abilities. When we think of human augmentation we often think of someone like the Robocop, a normal person with physical attachments and implants that allow them to do and see things others can't. In media and gaming the idea is ubiquitous: think The Borg, Iron Man and Master Chief as examples. However, the truth about human augmentation is actually a lot simpler, so simple that we rarely think about just how connected we are at all times, even without eye implants and rocket boots. 

It's mentioned (far to often) that people are addicted to their devices. Sure there's truth to that, but it was a cliche to say so more than a decade ago, now it's just getting annoying. It's like saying we're addicted to food, money or water. This is why I prefer to think of technological augmentation not as a physical attachment, but as a series of integrations.

Some kind of bubble cafe

In technical terms, an integration is any way two or more systems interact with each other. You add a bit of HTML and JavaScript code to your webpage to pull anything from the weather, stock market quotes or sports scores onto your site; now your application is integrated with Accuweather, Bloomberg and ESPN. Your work's payroll system is integrated with its customer relationship management system and it's qualitative reporting systems, so all the information each wing of the organization is seeing is synchronized and updated in real time. This allows everyone access to all the information they need immediately, and drastically reduces the need for clerks, couriers, typists etc. An old colleague of mine said it best: "integration is when the computers talk to each other, so we don't have to."   

We don't have physical brain-plugs, like in the Matrix, or infrared vision, like in Robocop, but our eyes, ears, voice and fingers are the perfect ports from which to send and receive an ever-increasing amount of information. Some readers may remember a time when you had to literally write a check then balance your checkbook by hand after each purchase to know how much money you had at a given point in time. If the calculation was off, or you skipped a few calculations and couldn't find the receipts, the only way to know was to go to your physical bank branch and ask them for the available balance in your account, or wait until a statement was mailed to you. If you had stocks, equities, high-yield savings bonds, etc. you could forget about calculating the value yourself. You could either wait for your monthly or quarterly statements to arrive, or hire a professional to keep an eye on your finances for you. Now, all of our financial information is available to us where ever we go. With the click of an app, you can look across multiple accounts, see interest accrue and stock values go up and down in real time. You can transfer money from one bank to another, sell stocks, and re-pay a friend for dinner from your phone in less than the time it used to take to wait in line at the bank to deposit a check. You are now integrated with your entire financial universe at all times. What used to take one or more days of errands, and interactions with multiple tellers, associates and clerks, is now fully accessible to you at a moment's notice.

It doesn't end there either. My credit card is integrated with my ride share app. My airline app is integrated with my federal known traveler identification, and it's all integrated into my brain via my eyes, ears and finger-tips. I can now wake up, get dressed, make a car come pick me up, book a flight to nearly anywhere in the world, walk through TSA Pre-Check and takeoff -all without ever reaching for my wallet or carrying a single dollar of cash. The only thing I'd need to remember to take is my passport, and the only time I'd truly need to speak with another person is if I make the alarm go off at airport security. Not even Robocop, with his sophisticated mechanical implants could manage that, and it would be significantly harder for him to get through that metal detector. 

Human augmentation is happening, and it's happening faster than ever. We adopt it without a thought, let alone hesitation, because it makes sense, and it makes our lives easier. Best of all, unlike a robo-suit, eye implants or a neural brain-plug, we can turn our devices off and put them down whenever we'd like. Plus, a phone and a set of wireless headphones probably don't hurt as much as a brain-plug. But, put me on the wait list for a set of Iron Man rocket boots.

Movie Review: Robocop (1987) "I'd buy that for a dollar!"

If California was home to a nexus of psychedelia and visionary experiences in the 1960's and 1970's, it was definitely a nexus of visionary blockbusters in the late 1980's and early 90's. Even though most kids of my generation were not old enough to see them in theaters, just about every boy my age not only saw Terminator II, Aliens or Predator on VHS multiple times, but had at least one or two action figures depicting characters (or Xenomorphs) from one of those great films. Which is why I'm surprised -and a bit ashamed- that I'd never seen the the 1987 Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, until recently. And, boy does it stack up to the greatest sci-fi action movies of that era. 

Scene from Robocop 1987

As the name suggests, Robocop features a part-man part-robot cop who patrols "Old" Detroit in the near future. The crime-ridden and economically depressed city needs a masked, armored hero to save the day and blast the bad guys. Sigh... seems familiar enough, so maybe that's why I avoided this one until now. In a world of dime-a-dozen Marvel supermen, Batmans and vigilante "heroes," I didn't need to see yet another maverick cop blowing shoplifters away with a comically large pistol. No way was a move called "Robocop" going to age well into the current political and social climate. It was certain to be a paranoid orgy of violence, warping suburban America's view of the inner-city into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of lunatic criminals robbing, raping and murdering good, innocent, all-American folk. However, as I watched it became clear that Robocop, played by Peter Weller, was more than just Dirty Harry with robot armor and an even bigger gun. He was a complex, sympathetic figure who provides us with a frighteningly accurate look into humanity's future. 

The film begins in the boardroom of the powerful Omni Consumer Products corporation, a private multi-national industrial concern that supplies large manufactured goods, civil services and, of course, weapons to the government. Think Raytheon meets Halliburton plus Proctor and Gamble, etc. The company has just won a contract to run Detroit's police force and is eager to demonstrate their new 100 percent mechanical policing robot, the ED-209. SPOILER ALERT: the demo does not go well. With only a few months until Omni is set to take over the Detroit police department, they need a solution. Enter Robocop, a part-man, part-machine hybrid with the hardware to take down the criminals, but with the mind of a human to act with discretion.

In classic Paul Verhoeven fashion the first few scenes of the film demonstrate that what we're about to watch is more than a simple action movie. Sure, it's got all the explosions, gun battles and solid kills necessary to keep any adolescent boy (or adolescent-minded adult) interested. However, Verhoeven -who went on to direct Starship Troopers (1997)- shows us early-on that the film has a message that goes deeper than the simple good-guys versus bad-guys motifs. Between the lines, the film is critical of policing, but not anti-cop; it's suspicious of artificial intelligence, but not anti-technology; and above-all it shows how badly things can go when for-profit commercial entities, rather than institutions accountable to the public trust, are put in charge of running a society. 

I suppose any astute grown-up could have predicted in 1987 a lot of what was about to happen over the next 3 plus decades. Computers would have an increasing impact on our daily lives; the privatization of services traditionally provided by the government would have expected results; and robots would begin to replace human workers in every industry. However, given where we're at in 2023: with crime on the rise; policing strategies called into question; flying drones patrolling airspace firing missiles toward the ground on a regular basis; and revolutionary AI software poised to change everything we've come to think we know, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more accurate and entertaining vision of the future than Paul Verhoeven's Robocop.  

Verhoeven, Paul. Robocop, Orion Pictures, Los, Angeles California. 1987.