Crew
Directors – Ivan Engler & Ralph Ettier, Screenplay – Arnold H. Bucher, Ivan Engler, Johnny Hartmann, Thilo Röscheisen & Patrik Steinmann, Story – Arnold H. Bucher & Ivan Engler, Producer – Marcel Wolfisberg, Photography – Ralph Baetschmann, Music – Fredrik Strömberg, Visual Effects Supervisor – Michael Scialpi, Special Effects – Crazy Flash (Erich Frey), Production Design – Matthias Noger. Production Company – Atlantis Pictures/Centauri Media/Schweizer Fernshen SRG SSR Idee Suisse/Teleclub/Egli Film/Ascot Elite Entertainment Group/Telepool Zurich.
Cast
Anna Katharina Schwabroh (Dr Laura Portmann), Martin Rapold (Lieutenant Samuel Decker), Pierre Semmler (Captain Pierre Lacroix), Regula Grauwiller (Anna Lindbergh), Claude-Oliver Rudolph (Igor Prokoff), Yangzom Baruen (Miyuki Yoshida), Michael Finger (Claudio Vespucci), Maria Böttner (Arianna Portmann), Noa Strupler (Child), Gilles Tshcudi (Klaus Bruckner)
Plot
Earth has become uninhabitable. Those who can afford it have moved to the paradise that has been established on the terraformed planet Rhea. Laura Portmann signs up as a doctor aboard the cargo ship Kassandra on a journey to deliver a cargo consignment to Station 42 part way to Proxima. This requires an eight year round trip during which they will be placed in suspended animation. A sky marshal Samuel Decker is placed on the ship because of fears of activity by the terrorist group Maschinen Stuermer. Laura is woken from cryosleep for her shift, only to find that something has breached the cargo compartment. She wakes Decker and the captain to investigate, only for the captain to fall to his death. The whole crew are awakened to deal with this crisis. Laura tries to investigate the mystery, finding that the ship’s cargo is actually bodies in suspended animation. Meanwhile, somebody among the crew complement is busy killing the rest of them off.
Cargo – not to be confused with several other films with the same title, including the zombie film Cargo (2017) and The Asylum mockbuster CarGo (2017) – makes the boast that it was the first Swiss SF film. It was a debut feature for co-directors Ivan Engler and Ralph Ettier and apparently took some eight years to complete. The film attained great attention at a number of international film festivals, although neither Engler and Ettier have made anything since then.
The plot of the crew or crewmember(s) woken from suspended animation aboard a space voyage to find something has gone wrong is a standard in science-fiction – see films such as Planet of the Apes (1968), Alien (1979), Alien Cargo (1999) and Pandorum (2009). (I have an essay on this in Films About Cryogenics and Suspended Animation). What Cargo does particularly well during its early sections is showing the cavernous emptiness of the spaceship and the sense of paranoid aloneness that Anna Katharina Schwabroh feels all on her own – that is until a shadow is ominously seen flitting in the background!
Cargo features some of the most dazzling visual effects of the era. The opening shots where we see a space station that has a unique corkscrew design starts the film in a great way. There are also fantastic shots where we see the crew dwarfed as they cross a tiny catwalk across the cavernously huge space of the ship’s interior. And especially the scenes when they arrive at Station 42 of tiny spacesuited figures moving through the vast architecture of the station with the planet in the background. All of it is care and attention to the film shows up in a major way.
The first half of the film creates a great mystery about what is going on, followed by the revelations of human cargo on board and growing mysteries about what is happening where it appears that the crew may have been lied to about the purpose and even destination of their mission. The script ably whiplashes back and forward about who and whether what they have been told can be trusted.
However, the eventual explanation offered becomes increasingly improbable. [PLOT SPOILERS]. Here the film has blatantly borrowed from The Matrix (1999) in its set-up of a group of people kept in a virtual illusion that is powered by other human beings. The eventual explanation – where the planetary colony has failed and so all of the colonists were just kept in suspended animation in a virtual illusion of a perfect world from which they kept sending back videos to their loved ones on Earth, while new bodies are sent to the station to keep powering the illusion Matrix-style – majorly stretches plausibility in a big way.
Trailer here (English dubbed)