I never said a more detailed model. Half the trick isn't adding more, it's making what you have look good. It can be as low-poly as you like; it can be a ****ing cube. It's if it looks like a low-poly model (as opposed to a heavily-armed warship), it's gonna suck. In this case, either blurring it slightly with a DoF filter or setting it up so the shadows aren't so striking would probably go a long way.
Or you could just subdivide the bleeding thing. It's not like that takes technical skill, and all you've really got there is a series of overlapping curved plates, so it'd do quite well. Provided your subdivision engine doesn't suck, so that it actually makes things curvier when subdivided rather than just adding to the polycount and draining resources.
