Let's Be Honest - Carpenter Sacrificed a Lot

He did the same in Halloween. Michael is inexplicably unkillable and seemingly motiveless. The character has always been a grey area, seems borderline supernatural but it's never explained. Some people love that aspect whilst many others could take issue with it. That's just Carpenter's M.O. I guess.

Yeah that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. The fanbase are putting a hundred times more thought into the premise than Carpenter did. Does the Thing replicate through tentacles or can one drop of Thing-juice in your tea do the trick? Can you really kill it with some dynamite? It doesn’t add up.

I had a similar experience with In The Mouth Of Madness. Nobody has sufficiently explained how much of the film is ‘reality’ and how much is the novel playing out.

Yeah ambiguity hurts my brain too it is the devil

Carpenter comes from a school of horror (post-Psycho) that believe explaining absolutely everything for the audience removes the possibility for real horror. That might explain some of the decisions he made here and in Halloween.

I'll give you that everything is not spelled out and explained - but that does not make the movie less logical or rule-driven.

The fact that we are arguing about it, have theories, etc. shows how the events of the movie could fit together multiple ways - as opposed to making no sense at all.

The Thing is a complex movie with many events where we don't have all the details, that's for sure. But the decisions of what is revealed and what is not revealed was made very wisely during the making of the movie. I don't really feel any laziness or any "I can't explain this, so I won't bother" vibe from this movie. It's more like "I think the audience can infer this", and yes, there are multiple scenarios for offscreen events, but ultimately it all fits together nicely and takes us from point A to point B in a consistent way.

Could you cite examples where "logic was sacrificed"? You seem to have referred to such event / sequence, but did not mention any specifics...

I call this star-wars syndrome.

In Star wars theres not a single prop , or even a frame of the movie that has not got its own wiki page , back history and essays written about it,.

No film can stand up to 40 years of that kind of analysis , and the directors rightly dont give a shit wether it does or not.
Trying to accommodate for that would be a total waste of time ,at best! and at worst ruin the movie.