Before you start jumping up and down in anger at the thought of a remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing, just remember this – the film itself takes its source material from John W Campbell’s 1938 sci-fi novel Who Goes There and Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World.
But now you can start that jumping, because Carpenter’s The Thing is also a classic, a genre-defining alien invasion film that featured loads of beloved, splattersome physical effects and some classic lines, including “Why don't we just wait here for a little while... see what happens?”
Well, none of that is stopping Universal and its merciless redo machine, but at least the company has hired someone who knows his way around quality sci-fi to write the script. Ronald D Moore is the man mostly responsible for the current best sci-fi show on TV, Battlestar Galactica.
And according to the film’s producers, the new film is planned as a “companion piece” to Carpenter’s. But it will likely still focus on researchers trapped at an Antarctic science facility who are menaced (and killed off one by one) by a shape-shifting alien beastie.
Now it’s up to Universal to station gun emplacements and ensure Paul WS Anderson comes nowhere near the film…
