Waste of Money.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

One of those films that has a lot of impressive things and other things that could have been done better. One of the things that Cargo has in its favour is that it looks great, the scenery is beautiful, the ship is like a character of its own, the lighting has a haunting effect and the photography and editing have a tautness and eeriness about them. The music also has an eerie quality while not making things too obvious, the first half of the story at least is very engaging and suspenseful as well as tightly paced, the dialogue is smart and intense at this point too and Peter Mullen and Daniel Bruhl are very well-cast, very brooding. In fact the cast is solid with nobody really disgracing themselves. The second half is not quite so good, it has its intense, suspenseful moments and the film is still well made and acted sure. But it also does come rather confused and even for a thriller things felt under-explained, granted thrillers can leave things open for interpretations and leave a lot of questions but for some reason Cargo didn't feel very complete at the end of the day. The dialogue becomes stilted by this point, the pacing loses its tightness and becomes plodding and Cargo does end on a banal note. The characters are relatively interesting in the first half and mostly for the second half but the viewer's frustration at Chris' actions increase more and more until reaching boiling point towards the end. Overall, a well-made film with some impressive things but a lot of the second half leaves one short-changed. Not plain-sailing but not a ship-wreck. 5/10 Bethany Cox

This is a delight. I have seldom seen so much achieved with so little. What a crew! What accents! This reminds me of the Bill Hicks sketch where he recalls that Brits seldom have more than a soccer ball to threaten people with.This German kid makes the big mistake of going to Africa outside of a World Cup event. Next the mistake of running out of funds. Falling foul of the militia. Losing his passport. And then the chance to get back to Europe on a cargo ship.We, who like films, are always looking for little gems that slip through the Net. They are not put together by committee. They are not put together on someone's PC. Things don't blow up every five minutes. The hero does not dodge all the bullets sent his way.One of the best captains I have seen.

Sometimes, people take a detour on their lives and end up going somewhere they would never want to be. That's what happened to a young boy named Chris who traveled on work to an African country and decided to stay (or so he says) to know more about it. Romantic fantasies subside when the truth about corruption and violence in African nations puts Chris in a dire situation... ... so he decides to stowaway on a boat for Marseille, a boat with a special treatment reserved for stowaways. Having slept harmless in the cargo hold for one night, before being found, everybody else on the ship thinks he knows what lies hidden in the hold, that makes strange noises and frightens the crew-members, making them disappear one by one. Is it a sea monster? A ghost seeking revenge?... The problem is: the crew knows more about it than Chris, and a sense of mistrust is visible from day one. Who's friend, who's foe? And who's more afraid of whom? Told to stay in his room, close his eyes, sleep, and ignore the strange noises at night, he decides to find out what secret hides behind a name written in the WC walls: "Rebecca". And he does. And he now knows he SHOULD NOT be alive, and survivor's guilt sets in... "Cargo" is a metaphor about live. About the way we have to live with our egocentric decisions, about the ghosts we carry and the mistakes we made in the past, and the way we deal with strangers and try to find a meaning to our lives in the experience with significant others. And, as "The Baptist" (the cook) says in the last minutes of the movie to Capt. Brookes, "It's not too late to be human again". So the Captain kills him. A very claustrophobic ambiance carries very far the sense of strangeness between the crew-members and the stowaway, and the story is told more with silence and secrets than with acts or dialog (except for the story about "Rebecca" and all the killings after that). You can almost feel the urge to demand that the crew accepts and treats fairly the poor Chris, but they are on opposite extremes of the Humankind. In the end, Chris's sacrifice redeems the entire crew that abandons the ship "Gull" for a new life on the ground, but his body will lie there, in the cargo hold, in the arms of Capt. Brookes, determined to go down with the ship to atone for his sins. Though simple, it is a nice movie to see in late night sessions. P.S.: there are no ghosts or sea monsters on this ship, but the ones we carry inside our own hearts.

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.