Avis des critiques

The movie's producer, Howard Hawks—who worked on set alongside the credited director, Christian Nyby—left his imprint throughout, not least in the movie's sly erotic humor.

In its expository first half, the dialogue whips by with the same vocal energy as His Girl Friday, while the leisurely narrative pace and close-quartered scenery recall Rio Bravo. This is quite simply the most dialogue-dense thriller I've ever seen, yet also somehow one of the most unhurried...

I saw The Thing from Another World last week at MOMA for the first time in 21 years, and found it even more brilliant and organic than before. This time around, I was struck by how political the film was, and how completely the politics were a function of form. Hawks and his scriptwriters (Charles Lederer and the uncredited Ben Hecht) conceive the movie as a struggle for supremacy between two genres: the fairly new 50s sci-fi genre, and the adventure/action genre that his protagonists improvise.

What's most remarkable about The Thing (which was remade in 1982 by John Carpenter) is its continued ability to function as both a taut science-fiction thriller and a telling snapshot of the Cold War paranoia beginning to sweep the country in post-WWII America. The story, about the battle between a group of stranded military personnel and an alien creature fueled by human blood, is a model of economic storytelling.

The Thing (from Another World) is a slick item thriftily combining a heavy science story with a pure adventure yarn for better than ordinary entertainment... Despite its indulgence in the cliche of the Mad Scientist—a vaguely Russian-type "Nobel Prize winner"—and the final letdown when the Thing turns out to be merely the familiar Frankenstein monster fines herbes, the film almost convinces you that its imaginative predictions may some day all come true.