No, they didn’t make this up; The Big Year is based on the novel “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession”, by Mark Obmascik.  Birders really do have something called The Big Year.  Or rather, there are several types of Big Year events throughout the world.  It’s one of the many, many things you get to learn about birding in this movie.  How there’s often a difference between birding and birdwatching is one.  That birders are probably cooler than you is another.  (They’ve probably been to more places and seen more things in one year than the average Joe Blow Couchsitter, that’s for sure.)  And btw, Attu Island, Alaska?  Kind of a big deal.  The Big Year pulls you into the world of birding, makes it look crazy, cool and amazing.  With this movie, it’s easy to see why people are drawn to it.

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Prequels can be awesome (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) or a childhood-raping nightmare (Star Wars Episodes I-III).  Usually all you can hope for is something that makes you love the source material even more (X-Men: First Class, Mallrats), or lets you forget about that last crappy sequel (Fast Five).  The Thing, a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World (all of which are based on the excellent short story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.) seems to have all the cards stacked against it.  But it rises above the slings and arrows of outrageous Hollywood overreaching and is instead a pleasant surprise; a movie that blends well with, and may even better, the one that came before.

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