You don't have to be a fan of John Carpenter's horror classic 1982 adaptation of "The Thing" to be disappointed by the 2011 reboot/prequel, but being a fan of Carpenter's film all but guarantees it. It's not that this new "Thing" is terrible (though it is fairly underwhelming), it's just that its slavish devotion to reminding you of the particulars of Carpenter's story invites constant comparisons to that much better film.

The plot of the new film, directed by Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., is pretty much the same this time around... a team of snowbound scientists manning a remote Antarctic outpost discover a spaceship and a seemingly dead alien entombed in the ice. After digging the creature up and thawing it, it proves to be very much alive, and what's worse, it exhibits the terrifying ability to consume and then replicate, in perfect detail, any other organism... including people. This begs the central question that made Carpenter's film so memorably tense and frightening: how do you survive a fight against a deadly foe who could be standing right next to you in the guise of your friend? Who can you trust, when any one of your comrades might be plotting to get you alone and then literally devour you?

It's a great premise for a horror story, evoking as it does some truly primal fears - of isolation, paranoia, violence, and above all the fear that your mind, soul and body could be completely taken over by something cold and alien. Carpenter's 1982 film masterfully exploited that premise with a near-perfect precision, depicting the breakdown of an isolated pocket of human civilization with an appropriately chilly bleakness and an almost nihilistic sense of grim, impending doom. Also, its awesomely gooey, nightmarish special effects, wrangled by artists Rob Bottin and a young Stan Winston, were nothing less than game-changers in terms of both their technical wizardry and their sheer wondrous imagination.

It's important to remember these things, because they all represent elements that this new "Thing" gets wrong, to varying degrees. It might seem unfair to continually compare 2011's "Thing" to the 1982 version, but this is a film that strives mightily at every turn to remind you of Carpenter's film, both in its basic story and especially in numerous bits of specific fan-baiting marginalia... ever wanted to know how that bloody axe got stuck in the wall, or why there was a burned creature with a ghastly melted face out in the snow, or where the helicopter pilot got his grenades from? This "Thing" takes pains to fill in those blanks, sometimes going to almost ridiculous contortions to fit certain things in. Make no mistake, this "Thing" wants very much to be compared to Carpenter's "Thing", both as a slicker updating and as a work of "let's explain how everything probably happened" fanfiction (and what could be scarier than having every detail explained so that it all makes perfect sense?) Regrettably, slicker doesn't always equal better, and dishing up constant fan-service doesn't automatically make for good storytelling.

This "Thing" falls into the same trap that's befuddled so many recent horror films, confusing sheer volume for terror. While this "new" (primarily CG) creature may be rendered with a level of squidgy, tentacle-y detail that would have been impossible to pull off in 1982, it never stops looking like a cartoon. Bottin and Winston's twisted creatures, in comparison, were frightening in part because they were tangible. (If Jan de Bont's spectacularly misguided 1999 remake of "The Haunting" should have taught us anything, it's that swirling blobs of CG flying around while shrieking just aren't scary, no matter how loudly and insistently they're shoved into your face.) Van Heijningen may be a true fright film fan, but his take on horror regrettably falls squarely into the school of having special effects jump suddenly out of the shadows with a loud "boo" noise.

What's really missing this time around, though, is a sense of atmosphere. 1982's "Thing" worked because it took its time building up tension, establishing the characters and then making us feel their mounting sense of isolated panic. This "Thing" tries to do the same, but mainly dishes up overlong scenes of underdeveloped characters yelling at each other, running away from things, or trading chunks of expository dialogue. The suspense builds occasionally, then tends to go flat for long stretches while we wait for the next boo-scare to come bursting out of nowhere. The question of "Who's the alien, and who's human?" was a central hook in Carpenter's film, and there was always a cold sense of logic behind that mystery... the plot took care to make the alien seem cunning, a predator whose strikes were more like moves in a chess game. This time around, the question of who's-the-alien can usually be answered by "Whoever happens to be standing around in the background in this scene, because it's been five minutes since the last kill." That approach may make for plenty of gooey monster attacks, but it fails to provoke genuine chills, and it leaves you not caring very much as to who might get killed. The characters have become secondary to the effects.

I want to mention that blood-spattered axe one more time, the one stuck in the wall in the 1982 version, because to me it's a perfect metaphor for why this new "Thing" fails to justify its existence. In Carpenter's film, it's simply a gruesome detail, a brief suggestion of the awful carnage that went on prior to the movie's beginning. You never see how it gets stuck there, because you don't need to... it's merely a creepy visual cue that something terrible has happened, and that's all you need. Your imagination runs with it, coming up with all kinds of frightening possibilities and adding an extra sense of haunting menace to an already tense scene. In the new "Thing", you will see exactly how that axe got embedded into the wall, and honestly, what I imagined back when I was a little kid was way scarier. As controversially gruesome and explicit as Carpenter's classic often was, it also understood that sometimes it's better to leave things hidden in the shadows.