Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton play the lead roles in this prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 film of the same name. When an experiment frees an alien from ice at an Antarctica research site, Paleontology graduate student Kate (Winstead) joins crew pilot (Edgerton) to keep it from killing and imitating them one at a time. The creature has the uncanny ability to mimic any life form it absorbs through digestion, thus demonstrating its potential to reach civlization.