Mary Elizabeth Winstead totes a flamethrower in the first batch of images to appear from the set of The Thing...
In what we hope will prove to be a cut above the usual Hollywood remake, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr’s The Thing is set before the events of John Carpenter’s 1982 classic, and will detail the fate of the Norwegian team of Antarctic researchers - whose remains Kurt Russell memorably picked through in the original movie - after their first encounter with a deadly shape-shifting alien.
The images we see before us here offer the first glimpse from the movie’s set, and show Mary Elizabeth Winstead in fine fettle as graduate student Kate Lloyd, who is presumably battling an off-screen entity with a blazing flamethrower.
Other images show actors Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje, Joel Edgerton and Eric Christian Olsen looking, by turns, tense, terrified and filled with scientific curiosity, while still others give a brief tour of the film’s chilly shoot.
The prequel will have to go some way before it can equal the prowling menace of Carpenter’s original, or the grotesque imagination of Rob Bottin’s remarkable special effects, but from what we’ve seen and heard so far, this revisiting of The Thing’s premise has been approached with a genuine respect for the 1982 movie, and that’s reason enough to keep an open mind ahead of its 2011 release.
As ever, click on the thumbnails to view the images in their fullscale glory.
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