Film Review - Harbinger Down (2015) - Spoilers

Anyone who makes a movie has my admiration. In fact, this extends to anyone who is engaged in some creative pursuit and puts it into the public eye. For me, it's my writing and drawing. It's never an easy thing to do, because it exposes some piece of yourself to public scrutiny. This applies to even a collective act like filmmaking. I approach reviewing films - or any creative product - with a little trepidation. This is someone's vision and labor that I'm critiquing and, in the case of movies, in a field that I've never done much practical work in.

That said, Harbinger Down is not a good movie.

It is set on a crabbing boat, the Harbinger, captained by Graff (Lance Henriksen) and crewed by one-dimensional characters. Also on board is his granddaughter Ronelle (Giovonnie Samuels), a grad school student and a couple of her colleagues who are tracking whales in the Bering Sea. They find a Soviet space ship from the eighties which contains the corpse of a cosmonaut. It also contains a virus that was meant to create people invulnerable to the rigors of space travel. What it does is infect humans and turn them into monsters with a lot of tentacles and teeth. All the cookie cutter characters are killed except for Ronelle, who manages to freeze the monster, while being left marooned on the ice to an uncertain future.

The film has an interesting history. StudioADI, a special effects house, was hired to provide practical effects for the remake of The Thing (2011). StudioADI has a long history in the film industry, having worked on films like Starship Troopers and the Alien films, starting with Alien 3. Their work for The Thing was replaced in post by CG effects. The studio went to Kickstarter to raise funds to make a film, featuring their effects work. They were successful and the result is Harbinger Down.

This story is far more interesting than the actual film.

The characters are threadbare, functional for a body-count but nothing more. The story is minimal, a bare-bones excuse for having a gooey, shape-shifting monster kill people in a dark, confined space, but brings nothing new to the genre. These weaknesses would have been acceptable, if the film delivered on what was promised; a show-case for old school practical effects like the 1982 version of The Thing and 1986's Aliens (The films cited by writer/director Alec Gillis as inspiration). Instead, what we get are mostly poorly lit, poorly edited scenes in which it is often hard to determine what is going on. The few times that the effects can be clearly seen, while they are competently executed, are neither imaginatively designed nor presented in an engaging or flattering manner. Watching Harbinger Down makes me want to watch The Thing again to see how practical effects should be done, in design, execution and presentation, as well as how to tell a gripping story.

Not Recommended.