The trailer for Harbinger Down the upcoming sci-fi creature feature written/directed by Alec Gillis and produced by Tom Woodruff, Jr of Amalgamated Dynamics is here and film fans that can remember when CGI wasn’t slathered all over the screen are going to love it.
For anyone that doesn’t know, the pair are responsible for some of the most memorable and iconic imagery and practical FX work in film including The Terminator, Alien, Aliens,Predator, Starship Troopers, Tremors and plenty more. The pair also worked on 2011’s prequel to John Carpenter’s classic The Thing but their work was either heavily augmented or replaced by digital FX.
Disheartened at the film industry shunning practical FX in favor of digital imagery the pair reached out to their fans on Kickstarter and said they’d put all their skills and knowledge from decades in the industry into a film which celebrated practical FX like films used to and Harbinger Down is the result.
The film centres around a group of grad students who have booked passage on skipper Graff’s (Lance Henriksen) 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 piece of old Soviet space wreckage entombed in ice, they find out that the Russians had been experimenting on tardigrades, tiny resilient creatures capable of surviving in space. After decades frozen in ice they’re waking up, mutated and the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.
