Movie Review: Cargo

Cargo has been in my Netflix queue since…who knows when. Probably since it was first released. Which, if IMDB is correct, has been since sometime around May 18, 2018.

I knew it’d been a while. If you have Netflix, do you do that too? Have so many things in your watch list that some get overlooked for months? I’m so guilty of that, as you can see.

But this past weekend I decided to do a little Netflix Queue Spring Cleaning. I deleted a bunch of shows that either

1. Had been out long enough and had bad enough scores to alert me not to bother, or
2. That I know I’m realistically never going to watch. There’s just not enough time.

I don’t know how many you have in your queue, but I had over 90 movies and TV shows in mine. Even if they all just ran an average of two hours, that would be…well, I’m terrible at math. Let’s say it’s 90 shows times 120 minutes each. That comes out to be 10,800 minutes. I think I divide that by 60 to get 180 hours worth of viewing time. If I’ve further done my math right, that’s 7.5 days –full 24 hour days– worth of watching.

If you’re a math-magician, check my math and let me know if I did it right. All I know is it comes out to more hours than I have to spend, so some decluttering had to happen.

The next phase was to pick shows that had been in the queue for eons and start watching. If they didn’t grab me within the first 5 or 10 minutes, they got axed too. That’s how I started watching Cargo.

A Zombie Bird Box

Netflix’s Bird Box was one I watched right away. The trailers had me excited, and I had a free Friday night the day it dropped. I was sucked in right away.

Cargo had the same effect.

Unlike Bird Box, it didn’t show the start of the contagion. Well, I guess in the case of Bird Box it was more of an invasion. Still, life as we currently know it was totally disrupted in both movies, finding our protagonists struggling to survive.

In Cargo‘s case, that’s Andy (played by Martin Freeman) and his wife Kay (Susie Porter) and their infant daughter Rosie (who was played by 2 different sets of twins). They’ve somehow found a houseboat and are attempting to stay on the river, thinking it’s safer. Which in some respects it seems to be. But all I could think was, “You’re in Australia and there are crocs. Better hope that boat stays afloat!”

Anyway, they find a broken down yacht. Andy goes to salvage it by himself. He finds some supplies and brings them back to surprise Kay. He fails to mention there could be something in the yacht’s closet. Likely not to worry her more, since she was taken aback he’d gone off by himself without telling her.

Outback Zombies

At this point it’s pretty standard zombie apocalypse movie fare, which is it’s a SNAFU.  (Situation Normal, All F*cked Up)

• Kay goes to check out the yacht by herself to see if maybe Andy overlooked anything. She gets bit by whatever’s in the closet, so they ditch the river for land in search of the nearest hospital.
• Kay dies, but not before biting Andy. He’s now got 48 hours to find someone to care for Rosie.

But here comes a new character, Thoomi (Simone Landers), an Aboriginal whose father has turned and who she’s hiding from her mother and other members of their community who kill the infected.

But Thoomi gets captured by a man who uses her for bait to attract the infected so he can kill them and then pillage whatever they had on them when they changed. (Wallets, watches, jewelry, etc.) Because he’s trying to set himself up to have as much “stuff” as possible so when the world goes back to normal he’ll have power.

Heart

Like Us, Cargo is loaded with symbolism and commentary about how we live now and what’s wrong with that. Dysfunctional societies, societal inequities, greed, the destruction of the Earth, the breakdown of nuclear families…lots there to process.

But most of all there’s heart.

Thoomi stole mine. While she was captured for bait, she couldn’t look after her father. When Andy freed her (well, freed them both, because he found himself in the bait box too), she immediately went in search of her dad only to find her community had found him and killed him.

Eventually she developed an affinity for Andy, as did he for her. You know his time is coming to an end, but when it does, and the way Thoomi deals with it…ugh! I’m not sure I’ve ever cried because of a horror movie before. I did at the end of this one.

Rating

Because Cargo made me feel something I wasn’t expecting to –I was just hoping for a reasonably entertaining zombie movie–I give it four and half out of five skulls.

The only reason it’s not a full five is because my only complaint was that Andy and Kay got infected like they do in every other movie: via their own stupidity. (Don’t go off by yourself. Good advice in real life. Even better during an apocalypse.)

But everything else was great. Or I was just in the mood for this kind of movie. Either way, I’m glad I finally watched it.