Universal has picked the last week of April to unveil The Thing, a prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 horror classic of the same name.  Director Matthijs van Heijningen will make his feature debut with the prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 horror classic of the same name, with a script by Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica) and Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street).  Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton lead the charge of a Norwegian scientific team isolated in Antarctic that must fend off the infamous shapeshifter.  As of right now, The Thing is the last major release before Thor kicks off the summer season on May 6th.  Hit the jump for a synopsis.

Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller The Thing, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.

Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up.

When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.