"As in the case of film genre, a fundamental problem for film remaking has arisen from "the ever-present desire for a stable and easily identifiable set of objects for analysis," and a related attempt to reduce film remaking to a "corpus of texts" or set of "textual structures."(4) In addition to problems of canonicity, these textual accounts of remaking risk essentialism, in many instances privileging the "original" over the remake or measuring the success of the remake according to its ability to realise what are taken to be the essential elements of a source text the property, from which both the original its remake are derived.(5) While there sometimes seems sufficient semantic and syntactic evidence to suggest that remakes are textual structures, film remaking depends, too (as does film genre), "on the existence of audience activity," not only prior knowledge of previous texts and intertextual relationships, but an understanding of broader generic structures and categories; In addition to this, film remaking is both enabled and limited by a series of historically specific institutional factors, such as copyright law, canon formation, and film reviewing which are essential to the existence and maintenance {to the "discursivisation"} of the film remake.7 In these ways, film remaking is not simply a quality of texts or viewers, but the secondary result of broader discursive activity."

Verevis, C., Remaking Film, in Film Studies Journal. 2004, manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk.

Like a mutant or early version of the Star Trek Borg, this Thing is not only in a constant flux, its nature is change, this is what the Thing is, it is the essence of changing adaptation and evolution, what you see is certainly NOT, what you get. Like the Borg, the Thing assimilates life forms it encounters creating conglomerate bodies that take the shape of that which was last assimilated, whereas the Borg transforms the living beings into Borg clones and assimilates thoughts and ideas, the Thing takes the outward appearance and nothing of the essence or thoughts of that which it assimilates.