FAQ

It can faintly be heard while the team is celebrating in the rec room after successfully getting the alien specimen back to base. They turn it off right before Sander gives his speech.

The four most likely explanations are:

If the ship crashed, it may have been a distress beacon. Alternatively, it could have been a warning from whatever was piloting the craft to any potential rescue craft to stay away. Also, it could have been a signal the thing activated to lure potential prey. Lastly, it may simply have been something on the craft that had still been active over the 100,000 years and the Norwegians were simply the first to pick it up on their acoustics.

There are indeed a total of 10 people, stationed at the base; Edvard, Olav, Lars, Peder, Matias, Henrik, Karl, Jonas were the Norwegians. Juliette and Colin were also registered there.

Sander, Adam, Kate, Carter, Griggs and Jameson were all visiting and wouldn't be on any official lists of being stationed there.

Vertebrate paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is invited by Danish scientist, Dr Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), to join his team of international scientists at a remote research outpost on Thule Station in Antarctica where they have recently discovered an alien spacecraft that appears to have been there for some 100,000 years. Nearby, they discover the remains of a strange-looking thing, presumably the alien organism, frozen in the ice. The Thing is cut out of the ice and taken back to their camp. As the ice melts, however, the alien reanimates, revealing itself to be a shapeshifter that assimilates its prey and adopts its form while remaining alien inside. One by one, the Thing begins attacking the team members, and paranoia spreads among those remaining.

Not exactly. While having more or less the same story, this film actually serves as a prequel to the 1982 movie The Thing (1982) (itself another adaptation of the John W. Campbell Jr. story that was the basis for La Chose d'un autre monde (1951)), as the film details the events that took place in the Norwegian camp from that film. According to the screenwriter, painstaking care was taken to assure that the prequel takes into account all the details about the Norwegians and their camp as seen in the 1982 movie. The prequel even ends almost exactly where the 1982 film begins.

Altogether 16. Besides the Danish Dr. Halvorson and American Kate Lloyd, there's Halvorson's American research assistant Adam Finch (Eric Christian Olsen). Other Americans include helicopter pilot Sam Carter (Joel Edgerton), Griggs (Paul Braunstein), and Helicopter co-pilot Jameson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Norwegians include Dr Edvard Wolner (Trond Espen Seim), Olav (Jan Gunnar Røise), Lars (Jørgen Langhelle), Karl (Carsten Bjørnlund), Peder (Stig Henrik Hoff), Henrik (Jo Adrian Haavind), Matias and Jonas (Kristofer Hivju) along with Colin (Jonathan Walker) who is English and Juliette (Kim Bubbs) who is French-Canadian.

"Thule" is the name of the Norwegian base and not the location of the base. Named after the mythical land located at the very end of the earth.

Thule Island is one of several islands known collectively as the South Sandwich Islands located in the southern Atlantic Ocean between the southern tip of South American and the northern tip of Antarctica.

It's a Sami song called Sámiid Ædnan. They also sing the song "Jeg gikk en tur på stien", a song for kids.

None of the films give any clear explanation for how the Thing survived being in a block of ice beyond the fact that it escaped when it was thawed. However, a reasonable explanation could be that prolonged exposure to extreme cold temperatures reduce its ability to function, eventually forcing it into a state of hibernation (this is even hinted at in the 1982 film). Essentially, the logic here is that what ultimately triggered the Thing's revival was when Sander drilled into the block to collect a tissue sample, it created a hole which exposed it to oxygen and warm air for the first time in a hundred thousand years- the sudden change in atmosphere causing it to awaken.

This film sheds a bit more light on how it copies its victims than the 1982 film. After the initial attack Kate examines a blood sample in the lab and sees that each individual Thing cell will attack the nearest non-Thing cell, absorb and replicate it. Thus, given the proper amount of time, an organism will be completely taken over by the Thing (simultaneously absorbed and duplicated), one cell at a time. This may seem like it should take a long time to accomplish but the reason why it occurs so quickly is because the cell duplication process is exponential. Assuming it takes 1 second for an invader Thing cell to attack and replicate a cell, now there are two Thing cells that can simultaneously attack two other nearby cells, accomplishing the task in that same 1 second amount of time. So within 5 minutes you've got 65,536 Thing cells, then 4.3 to the 9th power in the very next second. Though when looking at the blood slide, the cell seemed to take upwards of 10 seconds per cell. Besides the cell by cell way of duplicating its host, from the inside out, the Thing also appears to be able to initiate a hostile takeover, in which it grabs a hold of its prey with its tentacles, pulls the victim towards itself and begins to absorb the victim's body completely.

Three main theories exist in this regard (although there are likely many others).

The first and most commonly accepted theory (and the one usually accepted by the characters, especially in the 1982 film) is that either by its inherent nature or conscious choice, it wants to take over the world and transform all lifeforms; in effect, it is a sentient invader/parasite, regardless of how it got here on Earth (it could have voluntarily boarded the UFO, or was abducted by others). This theory is supported by the fact that after escaping from the Norwegian camp, it purposely seeks out the American base, starts to take over its people and even begins to put them against each other; it does not not try to use any of their vehicles in an attempt to escape. It is later theorized in the 1982 film that the Thing is consciously destroying the base, in an effort to kill every last survivor, and freeze itself again, hoping that another unassuming party will find it (but this is only speculation by the characters).

An alternative perspective is that it is not inherently hostile at all. Since a Thing seems to consist of individually spreading cells that can work together as a single organism, it is even possible that it does not experience consciousness until it copies an entire organism. That could mean that it also takes over the host's instincts and motivations. So it may simply want to survive and go home, a theory that is given credence by it fleeing to the spaceship and attempting to restart it. Notably when it first escapes the ice, it doesn't attack anyone, it simply wants to get away and only lashes out when cornered and after the scientists have already damaged it by extracting a tissue sample. In the 1982 film, the Thing has taken over Blair in order to secretly work on a crude spaceship, reinforcing the idea that the creature only takes over people out of a need to escape. It is of course possible that flying away with a UFO is not meant to return home, but as a means to spread to other parts of Earth, or even the galaxy.

A third, less likely but still plausible, theory is that the Thing is actually a form of scientific explorer and investigates new planets and lifeforms by assimilating a sample of them.

In the original script of the 2011 movie, it was made much clearer that the crashed UFO was piloted by a race of aliens that collected several foreign specimens. One of them was a Thing that later broke free from its pod, and caused a massacre among the other organisms on board. This forced the pilot to crash on Earth, to stop the Thing from spreading. However, since this information did not make it to the finished movie, the Thing's ultimate motivation is left open for speculation. It is certainly possible that its ultimate goal is a combination of theories; e.g. it was taken to Earth against its will, but like any organism, it has (or has received) a built-in instinct for self-preservation and perpetuation, which goes against its capacity for reason.

Like the John Carpenter film, the actual reason is never stated. However, a likely reason would be that the heat a flamethrower creates is capable of melting ice quickly, which is especially useful in regards to maintaining buildings (a significant build-up of snow and ice on the walls or roof can cause significant damage). If you look at the tunnel's walls in the excavation of the spaceship, they appear to have been melted. The crew could have drilled to the ship (although we don't really see any drilling rigs or similar) or used thermite to penetrate the surface and used the flamethrowers to widen the tunnels further. Flamethrowers could also be used to burn any trash or even human waste. In real life, some research bases do in fact keep flamethrowers for such purposes. Presumably the base is equipped with handguns and at least one rifle due to the contemporary Cold War and the close proximity of the Russian base.

The most likely answer is yes. However, it's more probable that the creature itself isn't any of the big, bad alien creatures seen throughout the films, but what is seen when Kate and Adam view the blood slide through the microscope. The Thing is seemingly millions or billions of cells that simply take over other cells and reproduce/replicate them. So, the Thing could be likened to a disease, but in a twist, a sentient disease. The simplest way to put it is that each cell of the thing is an individual living organism, and as a collective, they act to ensure survival. MacReady in the 1982 film deduces this as well. In the DVD commentary track for the 1982 film, John Carpenter talks about how, when the dog transforms, that we're essentially seeing several other organisms that the Thing may have assimilated on other worlds before it came to Earth.

The reason the movie has the same title as the first film is because the filmmakers felt that adding a subtitle such as "The Thing: Begins", "The Thing: Origins" and so forth, did not sound as reverential as just simply naming it "The Thing". Also, given that it's a prequel, releasing 29 years after the first film, many people may not have seen the 1982 film.