Entry 68: Harbinger Down (2015)

Harbinger Down (2015)

Dir: Alec Gillis

"Terror is just beneath the surface."

 

In 2011, legendary effects house ADI (Alien3, Starship Troopers) was contracted to provide the visual effects for the prequel to The Thing.  After months of hard work, the studio decided at the eleventh hour to replace all of their in-camera effects with "more consistent" CGI effects.  Undaunted, they turned to Kickstarter and raised enough money to create their own film, directed by ADI co-founder Gillis, which would utilize the work that had already gone into The Thing.  The result was Harbinger Down.

Grizzled sea captain Graff (Lance Henriksen, Aliens, Hard Target) allows his marine biology grad student granddaughter, Sadie (Camille Balsamo, TV's Treme) and her professor Stephen (Matt Winston, Fight Club, Zodiac) to tag along on his crab fishing trawler in order to study whale migrations.  A frozen block hauled up in a net turns out to be the body of a Soviet cosmonaut, frozen since the early 80s, whose body is covered in slimy tumors.  Because this is a movie, piece of shit Stephen wants to steal credit for the find from Sadie, but winds up getting royally fucked when the body comes to life and absorbs him.  It seems that the cosmonaut was a participant in a Soviet genetic experiment to make the human body more adaptable to space travel, but shit went south and they lost control of the experiment.  When one of the crew reveals herself to be a Russian sleeper agent, on board to ensure that the specimen never reaches the mainland, our intrepid crew must contend with both a traitor in the midst, a slimy monster bellow decks, and a major approaching storm...Who will make it out alive?!

I'd been following this film's development on-and-off since it's announcement and, in a great year for genre cinema that's included the fantastic It Follows and Mad Max: Fury Road, my hopes were high that we might be able to add another classic to the list.  Unfortunately, Harbinger Down just really isn't very good.  There's a great monster-with-a-woman's face at the end, but other than that, the much-ballyhooed practical effects (the entire film's raison d'etre) look fairly cheap and rubbery.  Rob Bottin's similar effects in the '82 The Thing all had form that suggested a terrible purpose; here, everything just look messy and shapeless.  ADI has done MUCH better work in the Alien films, and the lack of any real effort is disappointing and not up to their usual standards.  Director Gillis is (usually) one helluva an effects man, but as a director, he resorts to overused shakeycam and MUCH too dark cinematography (it's often difficult to make out just what exactly is going on).  Henriksen is GREAT, as always, but at this point in his career he plays roles like this in his sleep.  Newcomer Milla Bjorn is kind of fun as the hard-ass Russian spy, but the rest of the cast ranges from merely serviceable to REALLY FUCKING AWFUL, especially Winston, who plays his dickhead scientist character so broadly that it comes off as parody, and Balsamo...HOLY FUCKING SHIT, she's BAD.  with her model looks and stilted delivery, she's the worst big screen lady scientist since Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough.  Meanwhile, the muddled script never provides any real explanation for why the creature is doing what it's doing (does it it eat people?  Absorb them?  Try to imitate them?  Is it even sentient?)  and provides a few genuine "what the fuck" laps-of-logic moments (Bjorn has a weird foreplay session with one of the crewmen the devolves into a fistfight/choking, a sub-plot involving the recent death of Henriksen's wife is introduced WAY to late in the film and adds NOTHING to the story).  While this was clearly meant as an homage to The Thing, it actually reminds me more of the semi-obscure 1998 Jaimie Lee Curtis/Donald Sutherland vehicle Virus (shape-changing creature loose on an industrial ship crewed by both fishermen and scientists), with the creature from Leviathan (Soviet experiment that takes on aspects of it's victims) thrown in.  I suppose this is worth at least a look for serious genre fans; it certainly beats another found-footage flick or slick, PG-13 CGI-fest but, considering the immense talent involved, it stands as a disappointment.