Cargo

I picked this up for a fiver in HMV after browsing the DVD section. I was drawn by the box and thought it was a horror. I did not read all about its's awards etc and thought it was an out and out horror.

It is not - it is a slow burning thriller.

As the film went on I started to emphasise with the main character. What would I do in his shoes - was it right to keep your head down and say and do nothing.

I thought all the characters were played well although I thought the captain played by Peter Millen, from my neighbouring town Peterhead, could have been a little more menacing and not so much brooding - it looked though he was in physical pain rather than emotional. Special mention to Gary Lewis and Samuli Edelmann. Good character actors with something simmering below the surface.

Well worth a look.

Daniel Brühl stars as Chris, a plucky German traveler in Africa who stands up to pretty much everyone. In trouble with the local law and having lost his passport, he stows away on a cargo ship headed for Spain. Peter Mullan is brilliantly cast as the captain, Brookes, whose throaty drawl and demeanor are perfectly cast as a captain.

Once Chris is exposed as a stowaway on the ship, he becomes a part of the crew, but slowly starts to realize that the law and morality have no meaning on the high seas.

The film is moody, well shot, and the acting is exceptional. While many scenes are high intensity and very suspenseful, there is no excessive gore or any "boo" horror therein. The mood and the unanswered (and answered) questions leave the viewer questioning reality and what severe isolation must do to a crew of men such as these.

Daniel Bruhl is perfectly cast as Chris; his charisma turns on and off at will, and he transforms his character from complacent to annoyed in a second.

Peter Mullan accompanies Bruhl with his stolid, cryptic, and persistent mood, yet comes across as a character you have to like because he demands to be in charge.

For a moody, tense thriller with an intelligent back story, see this movie.

I think the reason the Sundance organizers like dark depressing movies is that no one else does. You can make a rotten comedy and it can still do $30 million at the box office. But if you're going to go the slow downer route, you'd better have A Beautiful Mind, or something like it, or you're destined for straight to DVD. And if Sundance is intending to encourage an outlet for all forms of expression, I suppose that's a worthy objective. Just don't plan on enjoying some of the movies.

Cargo is about a ship leaving Africa for Europe and a young man (Daniel Bruhl) who stows away. It is clear from the get-go that this is a mysterious voyage, with exotic birds and rough-looking sailors with secrets and mysterious searches and who knows what's going on. I certainly didn't. It all gets cleared up in the end, which proves to be anticlimactic. In fact, by the end of the movie I hardly cared.

Listening to the Q&A at Sundance I began to understand why. This was a script that took a meandering course to completion, often pausing at many forks in the road to production. Fantasy or reality? Nice guy or not? Happy ending or sad? Somehow, these decisions were made and as a result Cargo feels less like a director's vision than it does a project by committee.

I didn't really know or care about any of the characters. And with all the eeriness of the set-up, I was expecting something more.

The theme seems somewhat of interest, and it could have held attention if it were not for Daniel Brühl's character, "Chris", who is annoying to an extreme. For some reason, that the viewer is never able to understand, the incredibly innocuous Chris is able to screw up everything he touches from scene one until the grand finale. Anyone with even half a brain, finding himself in such a perilous state, would lay the lowest profile possible in an attempt to merely survive - which is the exact opposite route taken by Brühl's highly infantile and ridiculous character. After 30 minutes into the flick, you come to detest the guy's guts, wishing that the hostile crew would just fling the half-wit overboard and get it over with.

Do yourself a favour - skip this flop.

Very strong film. I just viewed it at the Sundance Film Fest. Top-notch cast, especially Peter Mullan as the Captain. His voice is like a limestone quarry. Great cinematography (and in the tight quarters of a cargo ship) executed by a crew that comes from documentaries. It is the director's debut fiction feature. Apparently all of his previous work has been in the documentary genre. I say a very good first outing.

Others felt it dragged at times, but I disagree. Very well-paced. It begins as a young man's desperate journey home to Europe and becomes a study of a depraved Captain. The subtext is a comment on government's tendency to outsource dirty work (in this case dealing with stowaways).