Mirror Camp

This movie is a remake prequel of a 1982 movie that is highly regarded, but I wasn't in love with. Same sentiments here.

It's pretty much the same thing, but with even less recognizable characters. There's a sort-of boyfriend character here but that is not exploited (a good thing, but that I sort of got a whiff of it is a bad thing). Mary Elizabeth Winstead isn't an attractive lead. She isn't wooden, but she isn't really engaging. She's the lead so a lot of plot development is for her, what else with the minor characters?

Almost all the characters are Norwegian and my subtitle-less copy made the language barrier better. But then apparently there are subtitles for the non-English bits, which throws out the possibility that the Norwegian dialogue is actually divulging important plot points. Now that would have been a much better homage.

There are plot hints to the original, not lewd hints, but they're unnecessary and run counter to the point of the film (which, according to the production, is to explore the Norwegian premise of the 1982 movie). Well, yeah, they did explore that. Basically, unabridged, what happened to the Norwegian camp is almost exactly the same as the American camp. At least the monster looked better.

(The Thing; 2011 - Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.)