It's an underrated genre film

I agree it’s underrated genre. I just rewatched it and after 20+ years it’s still holding up well at least in the sp.effects. I don’t understand while it was not critically well received at the time of the release. It suffered the same box office demise as Deep Rising a year earlier. Leviathan from 1989 was also the box office bomb, but the sp.effects sucked in that movie so I can understand.

This is a popcorn flick and in retrospect had it been released in the summer of 1999 I think it could’ve done much better. It could’ve competed with Deep Blue Sea handsomely. These two movies would’ve complimented each other drawing people to the movies. I’d say it was a bad marketing decision releasing it in the dead of the winter.

I've been thinking about this film quite a bit.... and I feel as if I just haven't watched it nearly enough.

I need to track down if there's a director's cut or something. I remember being greatly impressed with the visual effects at the time, and thinking about how under-rated this film was. I think I need to re-watch this film now.

I agree. I recently played Quake 4 campaign, in which there's a great sequence where the protagonist is "biomechanized", and the first thing that came to my mind was this movie. The thought of having body parts (mostly unwillingly) replaced with mechanical ones just terrifies me, and it's a horror subgenre that should be more explored. Robocop was not horror, but it always scared me for that reason.

Always thought the film was somewhat underrated. The concept might be unoriginal, but it has great practical visual effects, pretty good cast, decent atmosphere and terrifying cybernetic organisms. Don't think it's bad as they say, I like this movie. This also made me interested in the video game Cold Fear, which is mostly inspired by The Thing, with the setting of an abandoned Russian vessel, which makes me wonder if the developers were inspired by this film.

And about JohnMatrix's observation about movies with similar plots that were released in the same year or close to each other, this could be risky for the movie released after if the one released first bombed in the office box, and times executives choose to postpone one in order to avoid market saturation.

They spent a lot of money here for a "by the book" sci-fi/horror b-movie and the bang per buck is critically low. Stock characters, stock lines, stock plot, stock everything. It is dull. Yet, the effects are so good. Basically it is a FX porn and it is understandable, considering who the director is.

While watching it I was thinking of Death Machine and how Stephen Norrington (another FX guy) managed to make a much funnier movie with much less dollars.

I will leave unchanged my rating of 6 from 20 years ago when I watched it for first time, but it is more like 5.5 and only if I'm not thinking about the wasted budget and special effects.

This movie is great though, I loved imagining how all those biomechanical creations would work. People prefer less imagination and more generic stuff I guess.