Maybe may rate is a little too high but anyway - I really enjoyed the spaceride with Cargo and recommend it to everyone who like movies with spaceships and astronauts - watch, if you like movies like Sunshine, Europa Report, Mission Mars, The Last Days on Mars and the like. Anyway, what you get is a nice space adventure story with twist, solid acting and a good production. What you waiting for!?

We have here a rather interesting sci-fi film in the vein of Sunshine, Moon or Solaris, where most of the action takes place in an isolated, enclosed artificial environment. It's in the future, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable for some undisclosed reason, and people live in squalid conditions on space stations in orbit. There's a new heavenly planet, Rhea, where people can emigrate to if they can afford it. Our main character, a doctor, gets hired for a very long (8 years) shuttle cargo round trip to resupply a remote space station. With her salary, she should be able to rejoin her sister already on Rhea. She, like the other crew members, is in cryogenic sleep most of the time except for 8-month awake shifts. As one can suspect, she starts hearing strange noises, senses some kind of presence in what should be a deserted ship. She wakes up a few people, and then things get worse when somebody gets killed.

One would think that this would be a premise for some kind of thriller involving a nasty alien creature. Cargo is not really that. Sure, it has good suspenseful moments, but it's the kind of slow-paced atmospheric pensive movie where you're more likely to be interested in the unfolding secondary mysteries than on discovering who the killer is, or who might be struck next. At least that was the case for me. My mind was going in overdrive trying to figure things out, inventing hypotheses, and I like that. Unfortunately, and I don't know if it's a translation issue from the original German (although it's a Swiss film),certain important plot elements were not made clear when they should have been. I had to check the Internet afterwards to properly understand a few things. Don't worry, we're not talking 2001 metaphysics here, far from it. :)

The characters were rather stoic most of the time, but at least they were ambiguous and not easily predictable. A particular blossoming romance didn't feel quite right, especially how it started. It somewhat hurt the emotional involvement later on, although you can see the director really tried for a good pay-off. I thought the main actress lacked a certain something, but she became more convincing as the film progressed, especially in one of her final scenes involving greenery. The special effects were of tremendous quality especially for a non-American film. Every space structure from the outside looked amazing. On the inside, it was appropriately dismal, sinister and even grandiose sometimes. I think Cargo might disappoint if you're expecting something more action-oriented. I personally enjoyed the story despite certain badly explained plot elements. I also liked it more from an intellectual perspective than from an emotional perspective.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10 (Good)

"Cargo" is a Swiss movie from over 5 years ago written and directed by Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter. Both are certainly no prolific filmmakers, neither before nor after this film, so it comes to me as a bit of a surprise that I quite enjoyed the watch. Science fiction usually is not my genre, but I liked the idea here of a fictitious reality and even if it's mostly displayed as something bad, you could still argue if it's maybe even something good as the people living in it appeared happy mostly. Or did they? The lead actress is Anna Katharina Schwabroh and what I said about the two directors also applies to her. She is a prolific actress, but mostly only in theater productions and not in movies. I thought this was also a good watch from the visual perspective and does not have to hide behind the competition from Hollywood, where science fiction also seems to become an appreciated genre again with recent blockbusters "Gravity", "Interstellar" and "The Martian". Thumbs up for the people who made this 100-movie here and recommend it. Almost a must-see if you love the genre.