Source: Beyond Hollywood

The official plot synopsis and release date have been revealed today for the Matthijs van Heijningen-directed film, The Thing (a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film of the same name). Read on for more!

Official Plot 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 (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 official release date for the prequel is April 29, 2011, one week before Marvel’s Thor film. As a huge fan of John Carpenter’s 1982 film, this is very high on my list of must-see films for next year. It bums me out a bit that it probably won’t get much time to shine, being released so soon before the summer movie season begins. I guess that’s the movie biz for ya.