Don't let The Thing out

First things first. This isn't a remake of the 1982 John Carpenter classic. It is, however, a prequel. We now find out what happened to the Norwegians and Outpost 31. It's hard to say when the film ends and the 1982 version starts but i would guess it's just before the helicopter lands at the start of the original.

What Universal has sent over is a making-of featurette and a set of images - click on any of them to make em bigger.

There isn't a UK trailer for the film available so you will have to put up with the US, domestic, one instead...

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. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, the thriller is produced by Strike Entertainment’s Marc Abraham and Eric Newman (Dawn of the Dead).

Tearing into UK cinemas December 2, 2011