Buy it... if you like hearing Marco Beltrami in his comfort zone, providing predictable horror music for the interior of this prequel while bracketing it with impressively tonal, melodic expressions of tragedy.

Avoid it... if only one obvious, token nod to Ennio Morricone's music for the 1982 movie, as well as practically no stylistic similarity between the two scores, is too much disparity within the same concept for your ears.

Beltrami

The Thing: (Marco Beltrami) Considering how many really substandard remakes of classic horror films have been attempted through the years, it's satisfying to see that the filmmakers responsible for 2011's The Thing decided to make their film a prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 version rather than attempt to improve upon it. So faithful was Matthijs Van Heijningen Jr.'s prequel that painstaking care was made to create sets absolutely identical to those seen in the 1982 movie when applicable, literally using screen captures from that film to fill in as much detail in the prequel's design as possible. Plot points also had to be accounted for, and every last clue learned in Carpenter's movie is addressed in the narrative of the new The Thing. The prequel's plot details the events leading up to demise of the Norwegian camp in Antarctica, depicting the initial discovery of the alien "thing" in its crashed spaceship, its escape, and its subsequent instigation of the murders that followed as the occupants of the camp, padded by a few Americans, turn their paranoia against each other. The protagonist is an American female scientist who attempts to discover the cellular capabilities of the creature, but she inevitably is caught in the middle of the standoff between terrified groups in the camp. The prequel carefully builds momentum to the exact scene involving the helicopter pursuit of a running dog (taken over by the "thing") witnessed at the start of the 1982 film. The amount of loyalty to the concept earned the 2011 version of The Thing some kudos from critics, though in their mixed reactions they cited its unfortunate redundancy with the original as a detriment. Essentially, both plots push the same horror genre buttons, the prequel degenerating into a shock fest rather than meeting its goals of accentuating character drama. The score for the 1982 movie was not among Carpenter's own musical efforts, but rather by famed composer Ennio Morricone. His take on the concept is remembered by an extremely lonely organ theme over an echoing, thumping electronic heartbeat effect. For the 2011 prequel, horror master Marco Beltrami was hired to do the honors of setting up Morricone's score, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of the resulting music is the fact that despite all of the attempts made by the filmmakers to remain consistent with the 1982 movie, nothing much from Morricone's music, including its general style, is resurrected in 2011. Only a faithful reprise of the heartbeat effect at the end of "God's Country Music" establishes a connection between the two films.

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Outside of the one obvious nod to Morricone's score, the director of 2011's The Thing decided that he wanted to hear a more traditional symphonic approach to the prequel score in place of Morricone's less dynamic handling of the concept. Beltrami had already bounced around stylistically within the franchise or remake-related horror genre in 2011, turning in a rather tepid effort for Scream 4 and a far more fluid and lyrically intriguing alternative for Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. His stance for The Thing is closer to the latter work since he was instructed to include some melodic substance to both the female protagonist and the "thing," but the result is not quite as cohesive in its narrative as hoped. While there are a few synthetic embellishments in Beltrami's score, it's mostly an exercise in unusual performance techniques for the orchestral players. Despite the claims of two dominant themes employed, the score really only exhibits one that receives substantial development. Its rising three note phrases are vaguely optimistic but tempered in tone by the loneliness of the story's location. Heard faintly on whispering strings in "God's Country Music," the theme erupts in full ensemble mode in "Road to Antarctica." It's a remarkably dramatic idea for this context, reminiscent of his theme for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, repeated in full in "How Did You Know?" and referenced several times in lesser forms in between (including a "sinking feeling" moment with slight hints of the heartbeat effect in "Female Persuasion"). The performance in "Road to Antarctica" is particularly notable in its use of a striking, opening electronic pulse and percussive heartbeat emulation that does foreshadow some of Morricone's score. The theme develops into a separate, wholesome melody in "The End." The remainder of the score sounds like a rather predictable merging of Jerry Goldsmith's Alien (the alternating woodwind figures plainly give this inspiration away) and the unusual brass techniques of Elliot Goldenthal. Some of the applications of the latter in the horror bursts are quite interesting ("Meet and Greet"), though others do resort to the normal shrieking dissonance that populates Beltrami's less interesting contributions to the genre. The paranoia caused by the "thing" seems most frequently handled with piercing brass wailing, hardly original but basically effective. By "In the Ship," this wail has become a sustained dissonant pitch that is difficult to handle outside of context. Overall, the mass of the suspense and horror material in the middle of The Thing is not likely to impress, but the album's first two and final two tracks do contain upwards of ten minutes worthy of investigation (and securing a third star here), including some surprising tonal beauty in the case of the latter pair. Welcome to Beltrami's comfort zone. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.75 (in 20 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.87 (in 14,767 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.