Prequel to 'The Thing'

[Octoberist]

i'm shocked that nobody asked them, any of them, about the friggin' title.

 

[Aesop Rocks]

"The Thing"

 

[Octoberist]

a prequel to "The Thing" called "The Thing". grr

 

[Aesop Rocks]

"The Thingy"

 

[Spider-Man Luvr28]

First pic of the Norwegian camp site:

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/19738



There was also this written on Slashfilm:

reportedly quite a few practical creature effects are being developed. There will be CGI, too, but I’m happy to hear that won’t be the only technique used to create the alien.

Slashfilm has caps from Carpenter's version as comparison:

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/04/07/first-set-image-for-universals-prequel-to-the-thing/

 

[ImWithTeamConan]

So far so good.

 

[billmikea]

You can't get much better than Kurt Russell and Keith David, so why bother?
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tiffany jewelry|Wholesale tiffany jewelry|Cheap tiffany jewelry

 

[Ace of Knaves]

^Agreed man. The Thing will never be topped. IMO it's the best sci fi/horror movie ever.

But the news that they are using a lot of practical effects instead of just throwing CGI at everything has piqued my interest a little.

 

[nite-owl]

I remember when I was younger my uncle and my brother made me watch some of Carpenter's Thing it sacred the **** out of me.

 

[dark_b]

^Agreed man. The Thing will never be topped. IMO it's the best sci fi/horror movie ever.

But the news that they are using a lot of practical effects instead of just throwing CGI at everything has piqued my interest a little.

i notice that everytime they say this that at the end they use a lot of CGI

 

[Ace of Knaves]

Heh true true. I reeeeally hope they don't though. I mean, look at The Thing, all practical effects, but they still look great today for the most part. And that realness you get with good practical effects cannot be topped by CGI.

 

[dark_b]

i think the bigger problem with CGI in new horror movies is that they think they can show the monster in all hes glory.

the public doesnt need to see the whole body and head. just use shadows,special angles and good old school editing and they will be scared.

 

[Doctor Jones]

Base looks great and it's good to hear they're sticking to practical instead. But I still fear for this film. And it still shouldn't even be made. Oh, well. No use of complaining now. I just hope it's quality horror.

 

[Ace of Knaves]

Yea Doc you're right. *****ing and moaning is just a waste of energy. I'll check it out, if it's crap? Oh well, still got the masterpiece that is the original (well not original, you know what i mean!).

 

[Ace of Knaves]

Yea Doc you're right. *****ing and moaning is just a waste of energy. I'll check it out, if it's crap? Oh well, still got the masterpiece that is the original (well not original, you know what i mean!).

 

[Doctor Jones]

True. If this sucks we can just pretend this doesn't exist like alot of horror films and sequels. We've been doing it for years.

I love Carpentor's film, You can't get much better in terms of suspense, horror and paranoia than that film. The tension of wondering who it is was just great. It's one of those rare experiences where the viewer gets to be the particapant and not just the audience.

 

[Evil Twin]

Yeah, the unnecessary sequels and remakes have done nothing to stain Psycho, Jaws, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, Cat People, Whale's Frankenstein movies, etc. If it's bad, it will drop from consciousness in a hurry.

I expect that yellow snowcat will play a part in the movie. Likely in how it may get out of "we know what happens" jail.

 

[Dark Victory]

This will obviously never live up to the sci-fi classic so I at least hope for something that's befittingly entertaining.​

 

[Spider-ManHero12]

Wow, awesome set picutre! Looking foward to this.

 

[Spider-Man Luvr28]

I think he was rumored to be in this film at first, but now it's confirmed by Variety since yesterday.

Jonathan Walker (Land of the Dead, "Smallville") is the latest to join the cast of Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s now filming The Thing prequel. He'll star alongside Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton. Walker will play a British radio operator at a research station in Antarctica.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118017831.html?categoryid=28&cs=1

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/19866

 

[GreenKToo]

I cant wait..the first one scared me so bad as a kid that I literally had my feet up in the seat at the theater when the thing came out of the dog..
It really REALLY creeped me out...loved it.

 

[Spider-Man Luvr28]

CFB TRENTON — Canada's largest military air base is returning to the silver screen.

A Universal Pictures film crew spent Wednesday shooting scenes from The Thing, a thriller intended as a prelude to director John Carpenter's 1982 classic of the same name. Carpenter's version was itself a remake of 1951's The Thing from Another World.

Capt. Annie Morin, a base public affairs officer, said the Trenton scenes are set at McMurdo Base, a real outpost on Antarctica's Pacific coast.

The scenes depict characters arriving at McMurdo and will account for no more than five minutes of the finished film, Morin said. They included the use of artificial snow.

The latest film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Live Free or Die Hard, Grindhouse)as paleontologist Kate Lloyd and Joel Edgerton (Smokin' Aces; Uncle Owen Lars in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) as her crew's pilot. Morin said the stars were on hand for the shooting.

Winstead's expedition of international scientists makes a classic movie blunder: they conduct an experiment that unleashes something very bad, causing much running and screaming for the rest of the film.

In this case it's a shape-shifting alien. It can appear perfectly human — and that leads to paranoia among the scientists as, one by one, the parasitic creature infects them and turns them against each other.

The film is directed by Matthijs van Heijningen and written by Ronald D. Moore (the recent Battlestar Galactica series; Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Eric Heisserer.

"It's all being shot up here," said Universal spokeswoman Janice Luke, adding more shooting is happening in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada.

Filming used the CC-130 Hercules transport at the National Air Force Museum of Canada's air park and a second Herc parked not far from the museum outside the Aerospace and Telecommunications Engineering Support Squadron headquarters.

"We had another one that was being decommissioned so they used that one," Morin said of the second plane.


The scenes should be easy to spot for viewers who know their Trenton aircraft, she said.

"If they see a Hercules aircraft they'll know that's Trenton."

She added the footage will appear early in the movie.

The film crew paid to use the Trenton facilities but Morin said financial details weren't available.

It's expected The Thing will be released in 2011. Universal's Luke said a precise release date hasn't been confirmed.

The filming marks the second time in three years Hollywood has used the base as a set.

Universal filmed several sequences in 2007 for The Incredible Hulk starring Ed Norton and Liv Tyler. They didn't appear in the Trenton scenes, but costars Tim Roth and William Hurt did. That film was released the following summer.

http://www.intelligencer.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2546560

 

[Spider-Man Luvr28]

New interview with screenwriter Eric Heisserer. I'm looking forward to this movie based off some of the things (ha) he had to say about the prequel.

Website I09 recently caught up with screenwriter Eric Heisserer who shed some light on the subject plot-wise.

"You're actually in the Norwegian camp, before all that stuff happens. Heisserer tells the site. "You get to see how it happens — that's the reverse engineering there. The way we approached it was by autopsy, where the director, producers and I pored over Carpenter's film. We must have screened it two or three dozen times. And we'd freeze frames and have lengthy discussions about what evidence is there, that would lead to so much blood. It was a forensic discussion of Carpenter's films. That's probably where the whole "fire axe in the door" probably came from. Because we said, we have to justify that, we have to have a moment in our movie where you see that happen."

Heisserer continues, "If we do this right — I just spoke on the phone today with [Producer] Eric Newman on the phone today, he's on set up in Toronto [and] he said things are going well. But if we can pull this off, this movie will work perfectly [as] the first half of a double feature. So that the last shot of this film will be two Norwegians and a chopper chasing after a dog. And you can plug in Carpenter's film and they will both feel and look as they have been made around the same time."

The CGI question came up:

I hear that you made a point of encouraging the director to use real practical effects, not CGI — was that important to you?

When I came on board — like a writer has any authority to do so — but I went in like I did and I stomped my feet and banged my fist on the table and I said. I'm not going to write this if it's going to be a CGI-fest. This has to be practical, this has to be an old school creature, as real as possible. Whatever CGI stuff it's going to have, has to be as good as or better than that, we can't get away with computer generated FX in this type of film.

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/37...er-talks-bringing-the-thing-story-full-circle

Full interview here: http://io9.com/5524998/what-sick-john-carpenter-moments-will-the-thing-prequel-explain

 

[matrix_ghost]

http://www.coronacomingattractions.com/news/exclusive-script-review-thing-prequel

Script Review :

So here we stand, with a new Thing movie a guarantee at this point. It’s filming right now under the direction of Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. from a script by Ronald D. Moore, the guy that gave us some of the better episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, one-half of two lousy Star Trek and Mission: Impossible movies and the way-better-than-anyone-believed-could-be-possible reimagining of Battlestar Galactica.



I wonder, what the creative thought process was on Moore’s Thing screenplay? Was he mandated by Universal to make his story serve as a prequel to the Carpenter film? Was the idea of telling the story of what happened to the men and women of the Norwegian arctic base his alone? How many other writers and their ideas did the Universal creative exec in charge of this project meet with and pass by? I don’t have any answers to these questions but I can tell you this: if I was asked by my agent if I wanted to go to the Black Tower and pitch a second Thing movie I don’t think that I would take that meeting. Three decades have passed by and it would take a skillful wordsmith to find a path out of that corner that Carpenter painted us in.

But even with my high expectations for what a Thing movie should to be – prequel, sequel or reimagining – I come not to damn Ron Moore’s Thing nor am I hear to place laurels of commendation and praise upon it either; this is the director’s movie to make or break. I believe that Moore fulfilled both the official (Universal) and unofficial (the fans) expectations that have been placed on him. He was charged with finding a way to resurrect the franchise and make it appear to people that have no expectations while also not alienating those that appreciate the Carpenter movie. I went in expecting to hate what Moore did. By the end I was surprised to discover that I had no qualms with the screenplay. Does that mean I’m stoked by what I read? No, because I still believe that David Leslie Johnson’s aborted Return of the Thing mini-series would be the purest sequel that I and fans would want to see. That said, Moore’s Thing has more commercial viability for resurrecting the franchise than Johnson’s, so from a business point-of-view I can understand why this is the road Universal decided to take.

All of this is preamble but it’s necessary to the fans out there that need to know where the 2011 Thing movie is coming from. It’s not the enemy but like I said, this is a movie that is going to be made or broken by its director and how he chooses to execute the material. One of those decisions will be in how van Heijningen had chosen to realize the creature effects (Amalgamated Dynamics are making the monster effects, and they’re hit and miss for me based on their past work.)


For those of you wondering if the 2011 Thing makes reference to Carpenter’s at all, it does. Although it’s never specifically stated when the action takes place, there are things like Rubik’s Cube and people watching VHS tapes that place the setting in the early 1980s, just as Carpenter’s 1982 movie. There’s a nice moment where we might get to see MacReady, Kurt Russell’s helicopter pilot character, referenced in a plausible and comedic way. We know that the Norwegian base will ultimately be destroyed, and that the Thing-dog will make its way to MacCready’s Outpost #31 camp. Moore doesn’t retcon the story anchors in the ’82 Thing. We will get to see how The Thing rampaged through the Norwegian base. We also get to find out other easter eggs that Thing fans will recall, such as why someone at the Norwegian base slit their wrists sitting in a chair, or why the melted two-face Thing body was laying out in the snow for MacReady and Doc Copper to find, or how the two Norg men in the helicopter came to chase the Thing-dog to the American base. In this regard Moore’s Thing story is water-tight with the events depicted in Carpenter’s film.

By now you’ll note that for this script review I’m really doing my best to stay away from spoilers. If you’re reading this hoping that I will tell you who turns out to be a Thing and what happens at the end of the film, sorry to disappoint. I think that the bigger question that fans of The Thing want to know is whether this project is a creative failure at the script level and whether there’s any reason to look ahead. That’s precisely what I’m hoping to give to you by the end of this article, not a blow-by-blow summary of the story’s plot points. If anything, you already KNOW what happens by having knowledge of the 1982 film; all that’s new is finding out the nature of how The Thing came to thaw out in the Norwegian camp and subsequently destroy it. The spectacle will be in seeing the new Thing effects and seeing if they’re worthy of standing alongside the Bottin creature effects of the original.

Rest assured that there are scenes which will show The Thing morphing its shape, attacking from its duplicates in human form. One deviation with the way Moore’s described his Thing transformations from the Johnson mini-series Thing transformations is that there aren’t any Thing metamorphosis reveals/attacks that are carbon copies from the Carpenter movie. In Johnson’s climax for Return of the Thing there were hundreds of spider-heads Things in mini-spaceships trying to flee to the outside world; in Moore’s there’s no duplicate creatures, it’s all new monster shapes. Indeed, there’s one Thing reveal that, if properly delivered, could stand alongside the Norris-chest-bursts-open moment from Carpenter’s movie. I totally didn’t see this particular Thing reveal coming (and neither did the human characters left who happened to be standing in the same room) but the way that The Thing chose to reveal itself and attack the remaining people makes a logical, if grotesque, sense. I hope that the director pulls that particular scene off well in the film because on paper it's a pretty "Goddamn that's insane!" scary moment.



I’ll add this: we’ll get to see the inside of The Thing’s saucer as well as a hint as to what it may have been doing in there. The otherworldly-ness of the saucer’s insides was described well by Moore and I hope will remain intact in the finished product.

Alas, if there’s a major flaw in Moore’s story it’s that it doesn’t add anything new. We’ve seen this same story played out in the Carpenter movie; we watch the characters discover what the threat is they’re up against and then paranoia sets in amongst them as they freak out about who’s not really human anymore. The Thing’s goals aren’t any different in the prequel than the first film, which are to get out of isolation and absorb everything on the planet. There’s flamethrowers, sticks of dynamite and a snowstorm to cut off the base from the rest of the world. Ironically, in every way Moore’s Thing movie is perfect imitation of its originator when it’s really a franchise reboot that comes looking and sounding like it’s a prequel. By not taking any risky story chances Universal is getting a second shot at making a Thing movie that could make its money back and conceivably allow for a third movie. The downside is a narrative repeat of what played out in the first film, minus not knowing which Thing 2011 characters will live and who will be Thing’ed.

Look at this from a business standpoint. This path is safe and self-contained; if the 2011 Thing movie fails the franchise could always be thawed back out again in the form of a sequel, either directly or one that takes place years after the aftermath of the events at Outpost #31. If Thing 2011 is a success, the door is open for continuing the story established here and it violates none of the Carpenter movie canon. It’s a win-win for Universal, which brings us back full circle. This is why I believe they’re making their second Thing movie this way and not as a present day sequel like Return of the Thing's premise.

While neither a great script nor a poor one, Ron Moore did his job and earned his check for a harder-than-average yet creatively uninspired assignment. Now the success or failure of 2011’s The Thing lies on the shoulders of its director, his actors and the team making the monster effects. This one could go either way.

 

[Aesop Rocks]

So it's "meh"? :/