'The Thing' returns to chill us from Antarctica
Source: Agencies |
October 12, 2011, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IT is 60 years since alien thriller movie "The Thing From Another World" hit cinemas at the height of Cold War paranoia, and half that time since horror director John Carpenter revisited its themes in "The Thing."
On Friday, a new "The Thing" is back in cinemas, hungrier than ever, in a version being billed as a prequel to Carpenter's examination of fear centered on an alien from another world who is discovered by scientists on Antarctica.
Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen makes his feature film debut with the movie, in which 27-year-old Mary Elizabeth Winstead ("Scott Pilgrim vs the World") plays paleontologist Kate Lloyd, who is hired as part of a mysterious scientific expedition and ends up battling the alien.
Australian actor Joel Edgerton ("Animal Kingdom") co-stars as a veteran helicopter pilot who services the remote Antarctica base where a Norwegian team of scientists has stumbled across the alien and its spaceship buried in the ice.
Van Heijningen said he is a fan of both earlier "Thing" films, but he sees his version as "very logically tied into the events of the Carpenter movie." Yet, the new version exhibits a 2011 sensibility, with its international cast and female character leading the charge to kill the alien.
Van Heijningen cites famed British anthropologist Jane Goodall as an inspiration, but his character Kate Lloyd seems more akin to "Alien's" Ripley, the woman portrayed by Sigourney Weaver who battles the otherworldly creature in that 1979 film.
Of her character, Winstead said: "She is very smart, but she is very young and inexperienced, and she gets invited to join this expedition because they (the male scientists) think they can control her.
"But when very bad things start to happen, she is the one who starts kicking butt and really figuring out what they have to do."
On Friday, a new "The Thing" is back in cinemas, hungrier than ever, in a version being billed as a prequel to Carpenter's examination of fear centered on an alien from another world who is discovered by scientists on Antarctica.
Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen makes his feature film debut with the movie, in which 27-year-old Mary Elizabeth Winstead ("Scott Pilgrim vs the World") plays paleontologist Kate Lloyd, who is hired as part of a mysterious scientific expedition and ends up battling the alien.
Australian actor Joel Edgerton ("Animal Kingdom") co-stars as a veteran helicopter pilot who services the remote Antarctica base where a Norwegian team of scientists has stumbled across the alien and its spaceship buried in the ice.
Van Heijningen said he is a fan of both earlier "Thing" films, but he sees his version as "very logically tied into the events of the Carpenter movie." Yet, the new version exhibits a 2011 sensibility, with its international cast and female character leading the charge to kill the alien.
Van Heijningen cites famed British anthropologist Jane Goodall as an inspiration, but his character Kate Lloyd seems more akin to "Alien's" Ripley, the woman portrayed by Sigourney Weaver who battles the otherworldly creature in that 1979 film.
Of her character, Winstead said: "She is very smart, but she is very young and inexperienced, and she gets invited to join this expedition because they (the male scientists) think they can control her.
"But when very bad things start to happen, she is the one who starts kicking butt and really figuring out what they have to do."
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