Sandell Reviews "The Thing"

So I wanted to post this review on Halloween but was unable to. Probably due to my severe addiction to bad Television and cocaine-laced fudge bars. Sorry that's not true, I hate television. Anyway, here is my review of "The Thing":
In short, it's decent. The prequel of the 1982 John Carpenter movie doesn't do anything that offends me nor does it do anything that impresses me. The movie tries (Just not very hard) to give us characters that we can "like" so we care that they are going to get killed later. The Kurt Russel of this movie (ie protagonist) is Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) a palaeontologist who gets asked to go to Antarctica to examine an alien body. She decides to do it thinking it'll be totally awesome. As you can imagine, it wasn't for her. The movie tries to establish character arc-types but only does it for three characters, one of them being Mary Winstead's character. (At least her character wasn't her hair this time...cough, cough, "Scott Pilgrim")
One thing that I wasn't expecting after I saw this movie was the bad reviews from other people. Specifically critics on  Rotten Tomatoes were giving this movie a lot of negativity. These are the complaints from these critics:  the characters are uninteresting, the CG looks bad, and there are no stakes. I find the first one the most amusing because these characters are no less interesting than the ones from the older movie. I think the only reason these critics like the John Carpenter character's are because they like Kurt Russel and Wilford Brimley. This goes back to my theory in the review of "Money Ball". That theory is: if you have a well-known celebrity play the role, the audience will automatically like that character and want him/her to succeed. I guarantee if Brad Pitt played Mary Elizabeth's character suddenly, everyone would love her. (It would also be fun to see Brad Pitt play a woman for no reason).
As for the CG, I will give them that. It did look bad at times but not terrible. I think  fans of the 1982 version were just pissed that the monster didn't have that low budget feel to it. So they automatically hated it.
Lastly, they claim their were no stakes...this is a horror movie...what do you mean, no stakes? The stakes are constantly life and death. Stakes in a horror movie are not hard to do. Of course the stakes were there! Maybe if this movie had Kurt Russel in it you would see them?!
So that about sums up my opinion of this movie. Please keep tight for more reviews!