by The Great White Gypsy

For a change of pace today, instead of driving 25 minutes to Seattle for an SIFF viewing, I drove 25 minutes to the Kirkland Performance Center to watch Cargo, a sci-fi flick from Switzerland.

Directors Ivan Engler, and Ralph Etter decide not to break new science fiction ground (I don’t wanna. It’s stupid.), and instead tell the story of Arianne Portmann (Maria Boettner in her first feature), a doctor aboard an overcrowded space station orbiting earth in the year 2267. Apparently in the future, our dependance on technology and neglect of nature has left the planet mostly uninhabitable. The space stations are getting overcrowded and sickness is running rampant. Everyone’s goal is to either win or earn enough money to buy a visa to Rhea, a paradise planet lightyears away. Video messages between the worlds take years to travel, and are played on public TV screens to give hope to the public. Arianne takes a job on a cargo ship hauling construction materials to another station. It’s a 4-year journey, and the crew alternates between manning the ship and resting in hyper sleep. On her shift, 3 years and 8 months in, Arianne suspects that someone or something is aboard the ship. She wakes the captain and the security guard to investigate. When the captain is murdered, she wakes the rest of the crew to figure out who did it, and why their cargo bay is full of crates labeled “biohazard” instead of construction supplies.

When I was younger, I often heard the phrase, “Aim for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Even as a young, doe-eyed lass, I knew that was fucking loser talk. Unfortunately, Engler and Etter ate that shit up. The first thirty seconds of this film, I thought I was watching a Claritin commercial. The next 10 seconds, I thought it was Resident Evil. That didn’t really change as the film went on. In 107 minutes, I feel like I watched The Matrix, The Island, Pandorum, Alien, Sunshine, and Altered States. Virtually the only thing original about this film is the way these borrowed plot points fit together. I won’t spoil anything, but the beans get spilled about 45 minutes in, and after that nothing is shocking.

That’s another big problem with this film: the pacing. Tension can build, or ebb and flow, or spike erratically. But the tension in the film is almost flatlined. Even the overly-ambitious score by new composer Fredrik Stromberg couldn’t distract me from the fact that nothing was happening onscreen. It can’t even make the claim of being a slow, “isolation of space” film like Moon or Solaris. Mainly because there’s virtually no character development.

There are two great things about this film. One is the fact that it was made with a budget of under five million U.S. dollars, and the effects are mostly impressive. The space station in the beginning, and the one at the end, are not only well rendered but inventive in design. The interior of the ship looks good, and the cargo bay is a cold, empty, well-crafted contrast to the rest of the corridors. The other great thing, despite what I said before, is the concept. As unoriginal as all of the story and cinematic ideas are, the way they fit together in Cargo is an intriguing idea that, unfortunately, exceeded the skill of the writing. It doesn’t matter how good your idea is, if you can’t get it down right on paper, it’s never going to transfer to the screen with the same intelligence.

Cargo is not without it’s technical inventiveness or its sci-fi charm. But if you took out 15 minutes of pointless, artsy, new wave sequences, and the bullshit romantic element that made no sense, they could’ve used that time to build more tension and tell a better story. At least get some focus as to what kind of story you want to tell. Survival of the human race? Crazy mutant experiment? Alternate or simulated reality? No, you cannot pick “all of the above”.

Leave it to the Swiss to carry even topical neutrality into space.

FINAL GRADE: C-

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