Bloody Disgusting reported it weeks ago, Variety confirms it tonight: there’s going to be a new The Thing, and it’s written by Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore and directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., a commercial director who’s been attached to direct Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead for a little while.
This film will be a prequel to the John Carpenter version, but will apparently rely heavily on Who Goes There?, the short story upon which the original film was based. Still, the basic idea sounds pretty similar, except that this film will be set in the ruined Norwegian base that we see at the beginning of Carpenter’s classic. Apparently the main character will be McReady’s brother – I guess he didn’t know his bro was at that base? Weird.
If there’s a film less necessary than this one, I can’t think of it. The idea of telling the story of the Norwegian base just seems… dull. We know how it turns out, unless the action at the base is just like act one, and then things go somewhere new. But even that feels lame. It’s not that I’m against a remake of The Thing (it’s a remake itself) or a continuation or something, but this one just feels like some shitty comic book tie in as opposed to a story that needed to be told.