Comments on: Going to Brass

By: mike weber

mike weber — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:57:03 +0000

Actually, Carpenter’s film is quite faithful to Campbell’s original, right up to the ending. Carpenter’s ending is in the Lovecraftian vein of “horrible things that want to eat your face and will ultimately win no matter how smart you are”, while Campbell’s and Campbell’s is more in the line of “a Scottish engineer can whip anything if he understands what it is and has a piecre of wire and some chewing gum to work with.”

And, incidentally, in Campbell’s original, as in the Carpenter film the creature doesn’t “take over” people, it replicates them; it’s Heinlein’s “Puppet Masters” in which they take over people. After all these years, it just hit me that “Puppet Masters” has a parallel structure to “Who Goes There?”, and, since Campbell was Heinlein’s biggest market for years, and was well-known for feeding writers ideas… Hmmm.

By: Dan Alt

Dan Alt — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:17:49 +0000

It’s not his best score, as it’s sort of in the 1970’s, “Ooh.. a synthesizer! Let’s make it go beep!” vein. But it’s identifiably him. And the movie itself is much more faithful to the book. The ending is awesome.

The boat sinks, and she’s really a man who sees dead people after she wakes up on the farm in Kansas with her childhood sled.

By: stokes

stokes — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:10:17 +0000

To my shame, I haven’t seen the John Carpenter version, and I felt like I shouldn’t talk about something I haven’t seen. But yes, from everything I’ve heard, it is awesome… and the monster is much closer to Campbell’s original vision.

I didn’t realize that the score was by Morricone, though! I’ll have to bump this one up the old Netflix queue…

By: Dan Alt

Dan Alt — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:56:50 +0000

Oh, come on… you don’t even MENTION the John Carpenter version? Much better, AND it also had a high-profile European emigree composer (Moriconne) writing the score.