THE THING prequel gets a release date

THE THING prequel gets a release date

Jun 16

Matthijs van Heijningen’s The Thing prequel has been slapped with a 29 April 2011 US release date. If you already forgot, Iron Man 2 opened in that slot this year and did pretty good business. But Iron Man 2 had Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr., and Scarlet Johanssen’s chest going for it. What does The Thing have going for it? Some Aussie bloke called Joel Edgerton, John McLane’s daughter from Die Hard 4.0 (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and that really hairy guy who used to write all the Klingon episodes of Star Trek (Ronald D Moore). As much as I want this movie to be awesome, forgive me if I’m not salivating in my computer chair just yet.

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.