The director was present to answer questions as were actors Joel Edgerton, Adewale "Adi" Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Eric Christian Olsen and Ulrich Thomsen as well as producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman from Strike Entertainment. (Apparently, Mary Elizabeth Winstead couldn't make it because she was getting married!)
The teaser trailer opens in New York where Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Kate Lloyd is getting out of a cab in the rain and walking into a diner where she meets with Eric Olsen's Adam Goodman, a fellow biologist, who he tells her about a discovery in Antarctica. "What I'm offering you here is an opportunity to do something big," he tells her, and she asks him, "Do you actually know what it is?" and he responds, "No."
We then see a helicopter shot of the mountains in Antarctica and a long shot of the snow-covered plains with a vehicle driving through it in the daytime and then it cuts to the nighttime as the transport arrives at the base. We're then inside the Antarctica base and Ulrich Thomsen's Dr. Sanders, the biologist who brought Kate and Adam to Antarctica, is standing at a block of ice giving a speech, saying that he's never seen anything like it on a cellular level and that it seems to have been there for thousands of years. They start drilling into the block of ice as his speech continues, saying how the people who make this discovery, their lives will forever be changed by the impact of the find. We see a rather innocuous scene of all of them sitting in the base's rec room relaxing during some downtime, one of them playing an acoustic guitar, another scene of Edgerton's character walking cautiously through an ice cave followed by a couple others. As the drill continues to bore into the ice, the footage intensifies as we see brief glimpses of various members of the cast looking at something in great fear, as well as Edgerton holding a flamethrower. As the tension continues to build, we get to see brief glimpses of various creature parts: insectoid limbs, flailing tentacles, snapping jaws with sharp teeth, etc., though never a full-on look at the creature. Interspersed with these images are the words, "In a place where there is nothing..." and "they found..." then... "SOMETHING" and then the "some" part of that last title disappears leaving just "The Thing." It says "Coming in 2011" although it already has an April release date, which one presumes is going to stick.
After the teaser was shown and the actors each talked about their respective characters--pretty much covered in that set visit--the first question from the audience asked if we'd see the creature in its pure form to which the director responded quizzically, "Yeah, you're going to see it in its pure form, but the question is if that's it's pure form. It might have come from another planet and took over that form, but we'll see it in its original form by how it's in its ice and then it escapes from the ice and it starts attacking people and mutates each and becomes a different entity." The director also mentioned how the distrust and paranoia in the base after these attacks (and not knowing who is infected) creates factions and that the Norwegians form a group who speak in their own native language which causes even more friction with those in the base who don't speak Norwegian, and that's where the subtitles come in.
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