A group of grad students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship's crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly. It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation. Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for 3 decades, the creatures aren't about to give up the warmth of human companionship.
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I admit to having a huge love of John Carpenter's THE THING, a love which extends to the various THING rip-offs which have come out of the years. One of the cheaper of these is INANIMATE, a typical budget story in which a team of student researchers head into the frozen Bering Sea and discover a downed Russian spacecraft. It was originally launched as part of an experiment but has brought back something awful with it. The great thing about this predictable movie is the special effects, which look fantastic and were done without a single frame of CGI, something very rare in this day and age. The cast is nothing special, aside from reliable old-timer Lance Henriksen who actually gets plenty of screen time, which I was more than pleased about. The film is on the level of a typical B-movie but has enough suspense to see it through even if it is very familiar.
Bad/evil/dumb/sexist/egotistical characters are male. Maybe except the "evil" Russian lady spy, who's portrayed as super butch - easily overpowering any man. Sure, that's cool but it's so badly done and looks so fake. They're practically all caricatures. It's done in really poor taste. It isn't subtle in any way. I felt humiliated while watching it. The computer generated scenes look fake as hell as well as uninspired. I can't be bothered to explain my disdain for this movie any more, it simply isn't worth it. Really boring trash unworthy of any praise at all.
While the reason to make this movie seems like a good idea and the motivation and the effort that were taken to make Harbinger Down are truly honorable - for all creature-feature builder and its fan base.But in the end the movie proofs again, that FX is not enough - especially if the script and the editing are let us say it nicely; in a poor state. The movie is very dull, sorry. It's a wasted opportunity to actually proof those movie executives, that they are wrong how they treat the animatronic and practical FX departments. Afterall, I rather watch a flick with a decent, entertaining story (I'm talking about a basic horror-flick-story by all means. I'm not talking Shakespeare here!) with *sight* cheesy Digital FX. Or I re-watch an old classic, like Cronenbergs The Fly, Carpenters The Thing or Peter Jacksons Braindead, they proof at least that both works story and practical FX.I really WISHED for the makers of this movie it would have been a better movie - for the sake of their professions and their future. Therefore I give it five stars instead of 3.
Saw this movie and thought it might be a nice movie, until they show "Dutch Harbor". Funny thing is, I used to live there for a good number of years. This movie didn't even come close to reality, did no one even research the location? There are NOT that many trees there and the landscape was completely wrong. I couldn't even watch the rest, knowing they made such a glaring mistake from the get go. I will probably end up watching the rest, if only to see the other mistakes im sure are there. Hopefully they put more thought in the rest of the movie, although I currently don't have high hopes that it will be all that good.
