The trailer for Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s remake/prequel of The Thing has gone online.  The film shares the same title of the classic 1982 John Carpenter film but takes place before the events of that movie.  Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays paleontologist Kate Lloyd who works with a Norwegian scientific team that stumbles upon an ancient extraterrestrial ship in Antarctica.  Fans of the original know that it's safe to assume that matters go downhill from there.  After watching this trailer, I'm have no idea what the new film brings to the table.Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  The film also stars Joel Edgerton, Eric Christian Olsen, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.  The Thing opens October 14th.  Click here to read Steve's set visit.Click over to MSN to see the trailer in HD.Click on an image to see it high-resolution.

Here's the official synopsis for The Thing:

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.