Although pleasantly relieved, I can’t say I was too surprised to hear THE THING prequel has been given an R-rating. Considering how f*ckin’ gnarly the original is, how could one honestly call itself a PG-13 predecessor? There’s no way in hell.
Anyway, a first look at the poster for Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s film has hit the net today. Keeping with the simplicity of the original, the title is done in snow-lettering, superimposed over a black background…some kind of life-form placed front and center. I like how basic it is…no Disneyland, no Epcot Center.
Bowing October 14th, THE THING places us in:
Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller THE THING, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead (below), Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Eric Christian Olsen, Ulrich Thomsen and Kim Bubbs all star.