(3.5/5)This is not really a review, because by the time AFI’s first entry into the new Midnight section hit, I was beginning to fade a little bit and I don’t feel competent in my grasp of Cargo‘s details to give a full and well-informed review. However, I didn’t want the film to go by without a mention, because it does deserve attention.
Cargo is the first science fiction film from Switzerland, and also the first feature from its writer/director Ivan Engler. Those two facts make me a little more lenient toward the film, because there is a lot of cool stuff going on here, especially for a national industry and director who don’t have experience with sci-fi. The story concerns a future world where Earth’s resources are depleted and everyone lives on overcrowded space stations, hoping to get enough money to move to Rhea, advertised as a paradise. Our heroine Laura takes a job on a cargo ship – eight years of travel (most of it in cryosleep, but with an eight month on-duty shift to make sure everything’s going fine with the ship) in order to afford to join her sister on Rhea. Predictably, stuff goes wrong, startling truths are uncovered, and dangerous missions are undertaken.
The visual style is strong enough that I almost wanted to forgive it the weaknesses in script and story – the design of the ships and space stations and the overall look of the film are all incredible, especially on a relatively low budget. Also, like I said, I was drifting in and out for a brief bit in the middle of the film where a bunch of the plot exposition was going on. But I still figured out most of the plot – the main problem was not so much in the plot itself (which is not particularly new or innovative, but is decently structured) but in the rather flat way the plot moves along. It took me a while to nail the uneasiness I had with it, but it’s that there’s not proper build-up to the big moments, or release after them. It made it difficult to build real tension or feel that there was any danger to the characters, because life-threatening situations came out of nowhere and were resolved just as quickly. It’s tempting to say it’s just too slow, but that’s not the case – slowly building tension and paranoia works for me most of the time, but this didn’t, because it didn’t build. Things just kind of happened. The actors did their part with aplomb, especially Anna-Katharina Schwabroh as Laura, but they couldn’t quite overcome the uneven script most of the time, though there are scenes that came off quite well.
That said, I was still really intrigued by the potential that Cargo shows. During the Q&A, Engler seemed to completely understand what was weak and what was strong about the film – it was in production for over eight years, between production nightmares and financing woes, and he said the script was actually stronger a few drafts back before nitpicking and worrying over it so much, but the visuals were stronger now because of better and lower-cost technology. That’s exactly how I felt about the film, and if Engler has learned as much from the production experience on Cargo as it sounds like he has, I’m totally on board to see what he does next.
Directors: Ivan Engler, Ralph Etter
Writer: Ivan Engler, Arnold Bucher, Patrik Steinmann, Thilo Röscheisen
Starring: Anna-Katharina Schwabroh, Martin Rapold, Regula Grauwiller, Yangzom Brauen, Maria Boettner
Country: Switzerland
Running Time: 112 min.
