Harbinger Down - Hated It

Starring: Lance Henriksen, Camille Balsamo, Matt Winston
Director: Alec Gillis
Runtime: 1 hours, 22 minutes
Horror | Sci-Fi | 2015

Yet another movie where some kind of organism is “accidentally” released and murders all. This film felt a lot like Life, honestly, I could totally see this movie being a sequel to that movie if in the end the guy didn’t open Jake Gyllenhaal’s space pod. Harbinger Down is about a college grad student, her teacher, and the crew of the Harbinger (the main character’s grandfather’s ship) go into the Arctic Circle to study the beluga whales. When she puts her camera under the water, she sees a blinking red light and is forced to investigate.

Here are some problems I had with this movie.

1. The beginning. I don’t understand why the 5 minutes of “found footage” was added in there, it literally did not make any sense to me and the quality of that footage was very bad (which I assume to be intentional). I would have loved to see the scenery of Alaska in these shots, but instead saw a blurry mess.
2. The dialogue was not good. I felt like I was watching something that wasn’t professionally written or acted.
3. How was that space pod still blinking red? If he was a Soviet astronaut, there’s no way it was still blinking unless this movie takes place almost immediately after the union becomes Russia again.
4. The “twist” half way through the movie was not necessary.
5. I felt like the creators of the organism didn’t really know what to go for, so they just went for everything. Okay, I get the fact of all the genetic material, but come on now. I was not feeling this monster, though it did remind me of Annihilation.

For the most part, the ideas in this movie are good for science fiction, but I did not think it was executed very well when compared with recent movies we’ve watched. The film itself takes place in the Arctic Ocean/Bering Strait area and only a handful of times do you see the crew bundled up or having breath come from their mouths.

I’m going to have to give this movie a “hated it” because it just wasn’t good. (0/5).