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USD $1 ₱ 56.28 0.0000 March 27, 2024
March 26, 2024
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‘Harbinger Down’ Doesn’t Live Up to its Promise

It doesn’t really build much of a story between all these characters, the film solely relying on signifiers to put the narrative together.

It might be helpful to know that Harbinger Down is the product of a very successful crowdfunding campaign. The film was sold to the Internet as a throwback to some of the best horror movies of the 80s, the production promising to eschew CGI in favor of practical creature effects. And on some basic level, the film does fulfill that obligation. There are in fact practical creature effects in this film. But it’s a far cry from the films that inspired it, with shortfalls in writing and directorial skill.

Graff (Lance Henriksen) is captain of the Harbinger, a crabbing ship that has been chartered by a group of grad students to track beluga whales in the Bering Sea. While out there, they encounter some wreckage out on the ice. They bring it up on to the ship, and discover that it is a manned module from a failed Soviet space mission with a dead cosmonaut inside. Unbeknownst to everyone on the ship, the module is also carrying something quite dangerous. And soon enough, the crew and the passengers of the Harbinger are fighting for their lives against a terrifying creature.

The movie kicks off by establishing a very 80s dynamic between the characters. There is, of course, a diverse set of people on board, and they end up rubbing each other the wrong way. On one side, there are the blue-collar members of the Harbinger’s crew. On the other side are the uppity grad students. Caught in between is Sadie (Camille Balsamo), who is a grad student but is also Graff’s granddaughter. And the characters establish their roles pretty quickly: the Final girl, the potential love interest, the antagonistic narcissist, the muscle, the grizzled veteran, the doomed person of color, and so on.

But the film doesn’t seem to realize that it isn’t enough to fill those roles. It doesn’t really build much of a story between all these characters, the film solely relying on signifiers to put the narrative together. And the dialogue is pretty bad all throughout. And when the film just finally gets to the creature effects, it’s all kind of underwhelming. It appears that a crowdfunded budget still isn’t enough to reach the glories of the top of 80s horror cinema. The practical effects aren’t able to take center stage in this film.

Perhaps it is a quirk of the direction. In the right hands, with enough help from the camera, even the most modest of effects can look good on screen. But here, it becomes pretty plain that the order of the day is to keep the effects in shadow, to hide their shoddiness from the audience. The effects here were produced one of the best firms in the industry, and apart from one or two sequences, the film just isn’t equipped to make full use of what they’re given. The acting isn’t great, either. Lance Henrikssen is fun enough as the grizzled captain, but everyone else feels like a reject from a SyFy original movie.

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Harbinger Down gets kind of cute at times. It makes clear reference to films of that era, and fans of the genre might still get a kick from some of it. But for the most part, it just isn’t good enough. It certainly doesn’t reach the heights of some like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which probably serves as the film’s main inspiration. It’s easy enough to root for a film like this, to want it to succeed. But that doesn’t really translate into quality in this case.

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Movie Info

Harbinger Down
Horror, Science Fiction
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1.5/5
2 users
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