A while back I mentioned that Ronald D. Moore was writing the prequel to John Carpenter’s classic The Thing.  While I am generally ambivalent towards remakes, this project sounds like it could work out quite well, as it appears the writers are being true to the source material.

The Thing is set to be directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. (Red Rain).  Mary Elizabeth Winstead is set to star along side Joel Edgerton and Eric Christian Olsen, amongst others.  With the possible exception of Mary Elizabeth Winstead (currently appearing in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), none of them are major actors in their own right.  Despite the lack of A-list actos, I feel in this case the film will be better for it.

The recently announced plot is as follows:
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.

A recently released teaser poster at Australia’s International Movie Convention (sadly not released to the web at the moment) also looks damn fine.  All of which means that I am genuinely looking forward a remake!