Harbinger Down

"Terror is just beneath the surface"

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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CinemaSerf

CinemaSerf@Geronimo1967

February 8, 2025

No wonder the pod of whales are a bit narked. These annoying students have decided to gatecrash their merrymaking in the Bering sea, and along the way they manage to disturb a long-lost Soviet satellite that crashed into the icy depths. Led by “Graff” (Lance Henriksen) the team decide to investigate this jetsam - and after about five minutes are wishing they’d left well alone. Perhaps from a lab or maybe even from outer space itself, we don’t know - but there are some tiny microbes that are growing exponentially and they are cold and hungry! It’s like a chilly, watery, version of the “The Thing” (1982) only without the slightest degree of jeopardy, some shockingly bland acting and a reliance on mediocre visual effects that attempt to create menace out of something that’s flatter than the sea bed. I saw it in it’s “Inanimate” guise and that was about the size of it as it borrowed heavily from everything from “Dr. Who” to “Harry Potter” and left us with a beastie totally devoid of any sort of wow or shriek factor. At least it’s short, but I’d avoid, sorry.