Review: Harbinger Down (2015)

Harbinger Down (2015)

Rated R for language and creature violence

Score: 2 out of 5

So, back in 2011, there was a prequel made to John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi horror classic The Thing. It met a fairly mixed reception, not least of all because, while it was rated R like any good successor to The Thing should be, the quality of the creature effects was widely seen as subpar. This criticism only intensified after Amalgamated Dynamics, the special effects team that worked on the film, released behind-the-scenes footage of some of the practical effects they had created for it, before they were "improved" in post-production with mediocre CGI that lay at the root of many of the complaints that people had with the film. (Apparently, this was not the first time this had happened to them.) The response to the footage was so positive that Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr., the heads of Amalgamated Dynamics, decided to make their own movie, an homage to The Thing titled Harbinger Down with Gillis writing and directing.

And... well, as far as a feature-length Thing fan-film goes, it's not terrible. It's clear that a lot of love went into this, with some spectacular creature effects and better production values and acting than a lot of low-budget indie horror films. It makes one wonder just how much better the prequel to The Thing might have been if only they'd kept the original effects. At the same time, however, it's obvious that the filmmakers' background is in special effects rather than in writing or directing, and it comes through in every scene that isn't focused on the monsters. The script is woeful, with a slew of forgettable and unlikable characters and, if not plot holes, then at least some big leaps in logic, especially concerning the big twist involving one of them. The direction shows off the monster quite well, but it does little to build any sense of palatable tension or paranoia, the elements that elevated its inspiration. In short, it's a throwback to The Thing in a way that I don't think its creators were hoping for: namely, it's the sort of shallow gorefest that critics at the time wrongly accused Carpenter of making, with little going for it beyond the effects.

Set in the Arctic instead of the Antarctic, our main characters are the biology graduate students Sadie and Ronelle and their professor Stephen, who board the crab-fishing boat Harbinger owned by Sadie's grandfather Bill Graff in order to track beluga whales in the Bering Sea and determine how they may be affected by climate change. After the requisite clashes between the scientists and the blue-collar crab fishers, Sadie discovers something other than whales: an old Soviet space capsule that crashed in the ice in 1982, which is soon brought aboard the ship. While Sadie and Stephen argue over who has rights to the discovery, a shape-shifting creature aboard the spacecraft, the result of a Soviet experiment in creating radiation-proof cosmonauts that went horribly wrong, bursts out of its dead pilot's corpse and starts horrifically mutilating and mutating the crew of the Harbinger.

The special effects for this film aren't just the main reason to see it, they're really the only reason to. Gillis and Woodruff created monsters that, while reminiscent of the Thing mid-transformation (complete with tentacles out the wazoo), overall have a more crab-like appearance to them, with the implication that the "tardigrade" creatures (as they're called) had taken on some of the characteristics of the crabs they absorbed before they got to the humans. The monsters are big, ugly, and icky things that you do not want to tangle with, especially after the film shows us what happens when you do in the form of hideous mutations later in the film, most notably with somebody who, among other things, sees their head turned into a gigantic jaw. In all honestly, between the ship-based setting and the aquatic nature of the monsters, I was reminded quite a bit of Resident Evil: Revelations, albeit with more exoskeletons instead of that game's ooze-like creatures. The quality of the effects work in this film, especially with how much it's showed off, stands as yet another demonstration that a film doesn't need an enormous budget to have good special effects. It makes other films look bad, be they low-budget splatter flicks where it looks like they used props from Spirit Halloween or nine-figure tentpole blockbusters where all the money spent on the CGI merely put them into the uncanny valley.

If only that same effort went into everything else about the film. The acting is acceptable, especially whenever Lance Henriksen is on screen as Graff, a pleasant surprise given that the filmmakers had no experience directing actors. However, when it comes to the writing, I frankly hated many of these people. The professor Stephen, for starters, is an utter asshole for trying to take credit for Sadie's discovery, but at the same time, another "asshole" moment of his, chewing Sadie out for opening the spacecraft and taking a tissue sample from the dead cosmonaut, is actually a reasonable objection to her actions; after all, they were working on an unsanitary fishing boat that could have easily contaminated any samples collected, rendering them worthless. The attempts to give character development to the rest of the cast mainly consist of them acting like assholes with only one dimension to their personalities; you get the gentle giant Big G, the loudmouthed black dude Dock, the tough Russian chick Svet, the gruff Inuit Atka, the generic hero guy Bowman, the fashionista grad student Ronelle (her actress' background on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel shined through), and finally, Roland, who doesn't even get a single line of dialogue before becoming the first victim. Only the relationship between the heroine Sadie and her father Graff felt like it had any care put into it, and even then only the bare minimum, sold more by Henriksen and Camille Balsamo than the writing. Finally, a major third-act plot twist involves one of the ship's crew members being a spy sent to find and collect the space capsule. Even with this character's explanation that a whole bunch of spies had been inserted aboard Alaskan fishing boats to find the thing, the fact remains that it never would have been found if not for the university science team aboard the Harbinger, who stumbled upon it purely by accident. Never is it even hinted that the spy was undertaking any effort to locate the space capsule. Furthermore, the spy states that they had been inoculated against infection by the monster, yet they are later seen having been infected and turned into a monster anyway. The twist ultimately contributes nothing and creates more problems than it solves.

It's worth noting here that The Thing, both the 1982 original and the 2011 prequel, didn't need this subplot to keep the character dynamics interesting. In both those films, the focus was strictly on survival and on figuring out who was the Thing posing as human. It's easy to forget that, while the films showed off the monster quite early, most of the fear was mined from the paranoia over who may be infected. The fact that the Thing was intelligent enough to actively sabotage the crew's efforts was a major part of the fear it generated, driving home the fact that it could be anyone. No such level of tension is ever met here, as the film seems more interested in showing off the quality of the effects than in actually scaring the viewer. While this film does tilt in that paranoid direction sometimes, it never fully explores it, with the mutations depicted as uncontrollable and characters involuntarily transforming soon after they get sick in a manner not unlike a zombie movie. This would have been less of an issue had the film been structured like a zombie movie with more body horror (again, the Resident Evil games are a great example of such), instead of constantly reminding viewers of The Thing and trying to mimic its style of horror.

The Bottom Line

The joke basically writes itself. Harbinger Down is a lot like the monsters from the movie that inspired it, trying to be The Thing but never really pulling it off and rising above its B-movie nature. Gorehounds and diehard fans of The Thing will get a kick out of the effects and the references, but I can't really recommend it to anybody else.