Cargo

Bit disappointed by this film. I saw the amazing short that was the basis for this film a few years ago, and it packed more punch in 7 minutes than this version packs in 105 minutes. Everyone does their job well, the acting is uniformly good, the cinematography and setting are great. The problem is, the story is too thin and lacks depth. There are a couple of interesting ideas, the 48 hour time-line of the infection, the wrist bands counting down the 48 hours. But the padding of the plot feels forced and ultimately unnecessary. Everything could have been and probably should have been wrapped up in a much shorter time frame, and that is why the short film worked so well. All in all, it was a good enough film, but considering the source it should have been amazing. 6/10

Bad watch, might watch again, and can recommend for survival / zombie fans. I'm not a big fan of Martin Freeman, but he's a decent actor, and boy do you get a lot of him. Anthony Hayes makes a decent villain, but Caren Pistorius doesn't get much else to do other than "be pretty". Susie Porter and Simone Landers give great performances, but they feel terribly underplayed, maybe because they almost share a role. It feels like most of the time the actors weren't on board with the movie, they were there, they showed up and read their lines, but there aren't a lot of scenes that feel big. Honestly it really drags on, not only are you dealing with the isolationist effect of being in wide stretches of wilderness, but even when they get where they're going, there is nothing, and they do almost nothing, a lot. With one of the main characters being a baby, there just isn't a lot of dialogue happening, and the key interactions we get are heavy philosophical moments, far too centered on human rights for the majority. It's not that the movie is "bad", and ultimately I like it for the survivor's story, it's that it's mostly empty. There is a version of this story that you could do as a twilight episode and it would probably be better because you have to make every moment count, where this seems to be filling the run time.