Universal has debuted the first poster for The Thing, the prequel to John Carpenter’s excellent 1982 original in which a group of scientists in Antarctica happen upon an alien spacecraft and ultimately all hell breaks loose.
The prequel stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom), Eric Christian Olsen (The Back-Up Plan) and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agabaje (“Lost”) and is directed by first time feature helmer Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. The short of this prequel story is to say it once again takes place at an Antarctica research site, and the alien spacecraft is again found and leads to a confrontation between graduate student Kate Lloyd (Winstead) and scientist Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen). If you want more of the story, I’ve included the lengthier synopsis below the poster.
The Thing hits theaters on October 14. No word on a trailer for this one, but with the poster arriving I expect we’ll see something soon.
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.
The Thing serves as a prelude to John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film of the same name.
