It's pretty good, though some of his points feel like a stretch to me. Maybe Carpenter and the screenwriter, Bill Lancaster, were foreshadowing and using the environment to hint at MacReady's leadership traits, but I'm not sure. I thought that yes, Russell played him as stoic and those traits made him immediately appealing to the audience. But I felt that putting him in his cab playing chess was intended distance him from the others from the start so that the tension between them later in the film would be more believable. It's the fact that MacReady is so unemotional and rational that the others turn to him, but also a reason they were so ready to turn against him later in the film when they thought he was The Thing.

Since Lancaster pretty much wrote this movie and The Bad News Bears, subtlety didn't seem to be his forte.

It'd be fun to hear Carpenter's take on the video, though.

I lost my taste for Rob Ager when he denied that The Thing video game was part of the canon, purely because one of his theories would fall apart. I reminded him that Carpenter clearly stated that the game was part of the canon story, and he just didn't care and refused to acknowledge it. When it comes to analyzing a story, one cannot pick and choose which parts of the story are true and which are not. I found it very disingenuous of him.

Other videos he's done, such as his material on The Shining, I found to be very entertaining.

@Ellison Havelock said:

I lost my taste for Rob Ager when he denied that The Thing video game was part of the canon, purely because one of his theories would fall apart. I reminded him that Carpenter clearly stated that the game was part of the canon story, and he just didn't care and refused to acknowledge it. When it comes to analyzing a story, one cannot pick and choose which parts of the story are true and which are not. I found it very disingenuous of him.

Other videos he's done, such as his material on The Shining, I found to be very entertaining.

As I stated I don't always agree with him myself, so I understand your point.

he denied that The Thing video game was part of the canon, purely because one of his theories would fall apart.

I think I have watched all of his videos relating to The Thing... I must have missed this statement by him. Could you link to the video / article in which he states this? I'm curious about the details.

@sati_84 said:

he denied that The Thing video game was part of the canon, purely because one of his theories would fall apart.

I think I have watched all of his videos relating to The Thing... I must have missed this statement by him. Could you link to the video / article in which he states this? I'm curious about the details.

I went back and looked for it. To clarify my accusation, the moment in question was not during the course of one of Rob's videos, but in a comment he left in response to me. In his defense, he may not have put as much thought into a comment, as he would a true analysis of a film. The video is from Rob's other channel, Collative Learning. Link.

In the video, Rob claims that Childs was infected at the end of the film, and uses a few facts/circumstantial evidence to support that claim. My comment (screen name 'Cero Zenhael' if you want to look for it on the page) was counter-arguing that one of the details he relied upon was nothing more than human error in continuity, and I further supported my argument by telling Rob that Carpenter himself affirmed that the Thing video game from 2002 was, in actual fact, the canonical follow-up to the film's story, which would handily disprove his theory. Rob shrugged off my comment by saying that Carpenter "was bound to say that" because he was probably getting royalties from the game (and so evidently he was unwilling to incorporate the game's facts into his theory). I again counter-argued that Rob was being disingenuous by picking and choosing his facts, to which he did not deign to respond.

And to further clarify, I have a fair amount of respect for Rob Ager. He's an intelligent guy, and I enjoy much of his work.