So we have a stowaway on board after all.

Cargo

(2009)

Debut directors Arnold Buchner and Ivan Engler have clearly bust a gut with this low budget Swiss science fiction film (heralded as the country’s first such genre entry). The problem is, it never stops reminding you of the (usually) better movies that are its inspiration. And it’s not just one movie, the way Trancers is a cheap and cheerful rip on Blade Runner. A steady stream of genre films are evoked during Cargo, as if the makers want to cram it full of homages to their favourite SF ideas and produce a coherent and serious-minded feature in its own right.

The year is 2270 and Dr. Laura Portman (Anna Katharina Schwabroh) hopes to join her sister on the planet Rhea. The Earth is toxic and deserted, and the population that hasn’t yet moved to Rhea live on crowded space stations in her orbit. To pay her way there, Laura takes a job on cargo ship carrying construction materials to a distant station. The trip is four years there and four years back, with the crew taking shifts to stay awake while the others are in cryosleep. Three years and eight months later, Laura is on shift and becomes aware that she is not the only one awake…

There are many individually good little ideas in Cargo, but they get swallowed by the over-familiarity of the whole. The cryosleep experience is a suitably nasty, gloopy business that makes Alien’s hypersleep look like a dream ticket. The ship itself is freezing cold all the time, presumably to preserve power. But, while cinematographer Ralph Baetschmann does a great job with the ship, the sets themselves are seriously indebted to the industrial banality of the Nostromo in Alien (and there probably weren’t very many; no doubt they were constantly taken apart, rearranged or simply lit differently). We even see those revolving yellow lights from the xenomorph franchise. Prior to this, the space station and its occupants went for the rundown Blade Runner feel. And before even that, the lush advert for Rhea comes on like the offworld colony adverts in Blade Runner, or a less satirical promo from Total Recall.

You’ll need to get used to this, because the movie is derivative of nearly every notable science fiction spectacle of the last 30 years (besides Alien, Blade Runner and Total Recall, the other big name is The Matrix; it even tips its hat to Kubrick and 2010). That might not matter so much if it also possessed the vital spark needed to make it distinctive in its own right. That there are five credited writers probably didn't help matters; perhaps each was pressing to shoehorn in their top SF film.

Aided by Baetschmann, the directors ensure their spaceship feels vast and that it drips with drips and atmosphere; the prowling camera and very gradual pull-ins show a directorial duo that has studied the Alien movies all their lives. During the early passages of the film, this solidity ensures that the less than stellar CGI just about carries; much of it is attempting to service the physical spectacle, so the shortcomings are rather more forgivable. Later on, even the most charitable will in the world can’t fail to be aware of visuals the makers of Babylon 5 would have rejected by 15 years ago.

It’s this grounding that ensures the first half of the film is significantly superior to what follows. Deposited in a claustrophobic environment, you don't quite know where it's all leading. The use of verbatim sound effects from Aliens ensures one half-expects a monster to slaver out of the darkness towards our heroine (Ripley, anyone?) While it’s just as well they don’t go this route, the actual reveal is still faintly underwhelming (it’s been telegraphed by a news broadcast in the first five minutes anyway). I won’t spoil what transpires, but the type of plot device seen here has been used so frequently that it’s lost all claim to signalling brainy storytelling. Which is particularly acute in this case, as the protagonists' plan to resolve the situation fails to stand up under the most cursory scrutiny. Hey, They Live! has a more convincing denouement (it also had its tongue firmly in its cheek, which takes the edge off such concerns). Cargo ends up both rushed and not terribly exciting. Everyone's attempting a big finale, but it stutters under the limitations of bargain basement effects and a formulaic script.

While there are strong performances all round, it’s very evident that characterisation-wise the writers never got past the blue-collar Alien vibe. Still, the direction and cinematography show huge promise; hopefully these guys will get a crack at something bigger, better and a bit more original in the future.

Comments

Mondo bizarro. No offence man, but you’re in way over your head.

The X-Files 8.7: Via Negativa I wasn’t as down on the last couple of seasons of The X-Files as most seemed to be. For me, the mythology arc walked off a cliff somewhere around the first movie, with only the occasional glimmer of something worthwhile after that. So the fact that the show was tripping over itself with super soldiers and Mulder’s abduction/his and Scully’s baby (although we all now know it wasn’t, sheesh ), anything to stretch itself beyond breaking point in the vain hope viewers would carry on dangling, didn’t really make much odds. Of course, it finally snapped with the wretched main arc when the show returned, although the writing was truly on the wall with Season 9 finale The Truth . For the most part, though, I found 8 and 9 more watchable than, say 5 or 7. They came up with their fair share of engaging standalones, one of which I remembered to be Via Negativa .

Isn’t it true, it’s easier to be a holy man on the top of a mountain?

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Schnell, you stinkers! Come on, raus!

Private’s Progress (1956) (SPOILERS) Truth be told, there’s good reason sequel I’m Alright Jack reaps the raves – it is, after all, razor sharp and entirely focussed in its satire – but Private’s Progress is no slouch either. In some respects, it makes for an easy bedfellow with such wartime larks as Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg (one of the slapstick funny man’s better vehicles). But it’s also, typically of the Boulting Brothers’ unsentimental disposition, utterly remorseless in rebuffing any notions of romantic wartime heroism, nobility and fighting the good fight. Everyone in the British Army is entirely cynical, or terrified, or an idiot.

It’s not as if she were a… maniac, a raving thing.

Psycho (1960) (SPOILERS) One of cinema’s most feted and most studied texts, and for good reason. Even if the worthier and more literate psycho movie of that year is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom . One effectively ended a prolific director’s career and the other made its maker more in demand than ever, even if he too would discover he had peaked with his populist fear flick. Pretty much all the criticism and praise of Psycho is entirely valid. It remains a marvellously effective low-budget shocker, one peppered with superb performances and masterful staging. It’s also fairly rudimentary in tone, character and psychology. But those negative elements remain irrelevant to its overall power.

You have done well to keep so much hair, when so many’s after it.

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My Doggett would have called that crazy.

The X-Files 9.4: 4-D I get the impression no one much liked Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), but I felt, for all the sub-Counsellor Troi, empath twiddling that dogged her characterisation, she was a mostly positive addition to the series’ last two years (of its main run). Undoubtedly, pairing her with Doggett, in anticipation of Gillian Anderson exiting just as David Duchovny had – you rewatch these seasons and you wonder where her head was at in hanging on – made for aggressively facile gender-swapped conflict positions on any given assignment. And generally, I’d have been more interested in seeing how two individuals sympathetic to the cause – her and Mulder – might have got on. Nevertheless, in an episode like 4-D you get her character, and Doggett’s, at probably their best mutual showing.

You’re a disgrace, sir... Weren’t you at Harrow?

Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966) (SPOILERS) I hadn’t seen this one in more than three decades, and I had in mind that it was a decent spy spoof, well populated with a selection of stalwart British character actors in supporting roles. Well, I had the last bit right. I wasn’t aware this came from the stable of producer Harry Alan Towers, less still of his pedigree, or lack thereof, as a sort of British Roger Corman (he tried his hand at Star Wars with The Shape of Things to Come and Conan the Barbarian with Gor , for example). More legitimately, if you wish to call it that, he was responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks. Our Man in Marrakesh – riffing overtly on Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in title – seems to have in mind the then popular spy genre and its burgeoning spoofs, but it’s unsure which it is; too lightweight to work as a thriller and too light on laughs to elicit a chuckle.

The best thing in the world for the inside of a man or a woman is the outside of a horse.

Marnie (1964) (SPOILERS) Hitch in a creative ditch. If you’ve read my Vertigo review, you’ll know I admired rather than really liked the picture many fete as his greatest work. Marnie is, in many ways, a redux, in the way De Palma kept repeating himself in the early 80s only significantly less delirious and… well, compelling. While Marnie succeeds in commanding the attention fitfully, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. And Hitch, digging his heels in as he strives to fashion a star against public disinterest – he failed to persuade Grace Kelly out of retirement for Marnie Rutland – comes entirely adrift with his leads.

I tell you, it saw me! The hanged man’s asphyx saw me!

The Asphyx (1972) (SPOILERS) There was such a welter of British horror from the mid 60s to mid 70s, even leaving aside the Hammers and Amicuses, that it’s easy to lose track of them in the shuffle. This one, the sole directorial effort of Peter Newbrook (a cameraman for David Lean, then a cinematographer), has a strong premise and a decent cast, but it stumbles somewhat when it comes to taking that premise any place interesting. On the plus side, it largely eschews the grue. On the minus, directing clearly wasn’t Newbrook’s forte, and even aided by industry stalwart cinematographer Freddie Young (also a go-to for Lean), The Aspyhx is stylistically rather flat.

I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.

North by Northwest (1959) (SPOILERS) North by Northwest gets a lot of attention as a progenitor of the Bond formula, but that’s giving it far too little credit. Really, it’s the first modern blockbuster, paving the way for hundreds of slipshod, loosely plotted action movies built around set pieces rather than expertly devised narratives. That it delivers, and delivers so effortlessly, is a testament to Hitchcock, to writer Ernest Lehmann, and to a cast who make the entire implausible exercise such a delight.

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