‘The Thing’ – Plot, Cast List, and Trailer

Joel Edgerton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in The Thing
Joel Edgerton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in ‘The Thing’ (Photo © Universal Pictures)

The 2011 The Thing is a prequel and not a remake of John Carpenter’s classic 1982 thriller. Heading to theaters on October 14th, the new The Thing was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen and is rated R for strong creature violence…among other things.

The action thriller stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Kate Lloyd, Joel Edgerton as Braxton Carter, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Jameson, and Ulrich Thomsen as Dr Sander Halvorson. Eric Christian Olsen plays Adam Goldman, Trond Espen Seim is Edvard Wolner, and Kim Bubbs is Juliette.

Official Synopsis: 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 (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 (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.