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As much as I love John Carpenter, this film is quite dull and unexciting. What was once breakthrough spfx sequestered character development and menace for a few moments worth of eyecandy. Not to mention the fact The Thing feels like a poor man's retread of vastly superior film Ridley Scott's Alien.

Here is what I posted elsewhere defending my stance:

The influences Ridley Scott's blockbuster sci-fi horror film had on John Carpenter's The Thing is very obvious.

The alien creature invades or rather infiltrates a small group of human beings, in Alien, a parasite is attached to Kane's face like an umbilical cord and in The Thing, the alien arrives assimilated as a dog belonging to a nearby Norwegian outpost. In the John W Campbell story, the Americans themselves actually excavate the ship and the frozen alien the latter they bring back to camp with them and by thawing it out from the block of ice that held it captive they unintentionally reawaken it from a frozen slumber. Where they immediately discover the thing is missing and re-encounter a very much alive and angry thing while it is attacking the sleigh dogs. In this regard, Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World follows the story abit more closely otherwise departs from the story more entirely.

In the story, the American outpost has alittle over 30 personnel and about half of them get infected or assimilated. Here is where another Alien influence plays a role, it is interesting that both films have three survivors attempting the act of rigging the ship/facility for self destruction in order to destroy the alien menace and ultimately save humanity from being further invaded. In both examples, the two companion survivors get separated from the hero and are killed by the alien shortly there after. The surviving hero succeeds in destroying the ship/facility and destroying the immediate alien threat all alone in a final suspenseful stand-off (differences Alien has a strongwilled but reluctant female protagonist rather than the tough-as-nails masculine anti-hero archetype) but both face a doubtful future themselves. In contrast to Alien, both conclusions of The Thing and Who Goes There are similar in they leave with an open end casting doubt that the alien is truly vanquished and the threat thwarted.

Quintessentially, many consider Alien a big influence on The Thing, alot of parallels both in theme and style and I definitely agree.

But undoubtably Who Goes There influenced Alien, vast stark empty environments, small pocket of humanity isolated from civilization, the discovery of an alien derelict spacecraft, and subsequent monster on the loose in confined spaces and additionally the films It! The Terror From Beyond Space! (1958) and Terrore nello spazio (1965).