When TAFF candidate Jacqueline Monahan puts on her film critic’s hat, her motto is “Snark but no Spoilers.” Visit Cineholics and read her review of The Thing.

The third thing to be discovered in ice-covered Antarctica is actually supposed to be a prequel to the 1982 (second and best) iteration of the three. It’s been hell on ice since John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella Who Goes There? appeared in Astounding Stories, forming the basis for three cinematic variations on the cold war – the one where man battles space alien in a harsh climate that’s deadly in itself.

This latest version takes place in 1982 before the events that comprise the actual 1982 John Carpenter story. That makes it a prequel and the message is driven home with the first shot of paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead0 listening to Men at Work’s Who Can it Be Now? with dated earphones.

Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) recruits Kate to help with an icy retrieval of an alien life form found alongside its massive spacecraft in an underground ice cavern. He speculates that the thing could have been there for 100,000 years. Kate drops everything to fly 10,000 miles to the Norwegian camp in Antarctica….

[Thanks to Alan White for the link.]