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This isn’t necessarily new news, but it does move recent rumors into the realm of official announcement.  Universal has hired Ronald Moore to write the big-budget “remake/re-imagining/prequel” of John Carpenter’s The Thing.  They’ve also hired on Matthijs Van Heijningen to direct.  Variety confirms the film will take place in the Norwegian camp that first discovered, housed, and was destroyed by the shape-shifting bastard from the nether regions of space.

This info has been floating around as rumor for a while, but now that it’s official the same comments, questions, and issues remain.  The best part of the announcement (the only good part actually) is the involvement of Moore.  The man has shown his brilliance for the past few years with his Battlestar Galactica reboot, so there’s a chance this could actually be interesting.  Van Heijningen is a wild card, as his previous credits consist solely of commercials.  That doesn’t count him out though as other directors who came from the land of advertising include David Fincher, Gore Verbinski, Zack Snyder…

For me, the proposed plot is the sticking point here.  We already know in pretty good detail what happened at the Norwegian camp.  We’ve seen the spaceship in the ice, the block containing the specimen taken back to their camp, and the resulting destruction.  We can assume the alien’s assault played out fairly identical to what eventually went down at the US outpost.  So what is there to see this time?

They could potentially step inside the alien ship I suppose.  They could screw with the alien visually, presenting him in CGI instead of awesome Rob Bottin-like practical effects.  They could end the film with cameos from the entire cast of the 1982 Carpenter classic.  Anything I’m forgetting?

What do you think? Can Moore overcome the project’s obvious challenges?