Harbinger Down
November 11, 2015 Leave a comment
Harbinger Down appeared on Netflix and twigged something in my memory. ‘Wasn’t I really looking forward to that for some reason?’ I thought to myself, and spent a few minutes googling it while the opening screens played through. I had definitely clicked on the IMDB link at some point in the past!
It took a bit of hunting but I finally discovered that I had been interested in it because it promised full practical effects – a throwback to the horror/suspense movies of our childhood. One of the very first lines says something like “In the style of classics like Alien and The Thing…” and my husband said “I was just going to say it really has an Alien vibe so far. Those are both very good movies. I’m looking forward to this.”
If you grew up watching 80’s suspense/horror movies with 80’s special effects, you might even be tempted to say that the writing isn’t as important as the visuals. I mean, all those movies have the same damn plot anyway, right? As long as it looks cool, who cares! Well, Harbinger Down is here to show you that you are wrong. It turns out the writing is, in fact, pretty important. Because hoo boy does this movie have some bad writing. I mean, it does hit a lot of the same ol’ tropes you’d expect to see, but it also does some about-faces in its plot that make no god damn sense whatsoever, which just reveal how threadbare the writing actually is. They slapped together the template and filled it with special effects and didn’t put much more thought into it. “Oh no there are explosives on the ship! We need to save the ship! Whew thank goodness we saved it; now we can get down to the business of properly destroying this ship…” /facepalm. And the ending… sigh.
Though I will say the steps leading up to biological contamination at least made more sense than the whole “Hey let’s just turn off this sterile forcefield and expose this alien head to our air supply just for shits and giggles!” plot point in Prometheus.
The effects were great though. It really felt like an Aliens era movie, and that’s something you just don’t feel that much nowadays. I’m not a big fan of the heavy handed leaning on CGI nowadays, although I’m not sure that 100% practical is the best way to go either. I feel like CGI enhanced practical effects lead to the best results, but you just have to appreciate the awesomeness of a well executed practical effect and I hope movies like this keep the art alive.