Loosetooth Reviews: Cargo (2017)

Let’s be honest zombie movies have been dead for some time, and The Walking Dead is largely to blame. It made Zombie uprisings mainstream, and it’s serious survival story has all but killed the genre, not even the Granddaddy of the undead George A. Romero could get out from under it’s intimidating shadow.

Since the start of the AMC series zombie movies have lent towards the comical, whether it’s the likes of Life After Beth, Cooties or Cockneys vs. Zombies they’ve all attempted to tell stories of the reanimated through humour, not that it’s a faulty mechanism, when used correctly it can produce something wonderful, Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland are perfect examples of it done right.

And when Hollywood tried to push it the other way, making a blockbuster spectacular in the form of World War Z, they took a superb book and ripped the heart and soul from it, instead building a hero vehicle for Brad Pitt to flex is muscles in.

It’s been left to filmmakers to attempt something different, to move away from the action set pieces, the blood and guts, and the lame jokes. They’ve had to explore the human side of the apocalypse, to find out how everyday man would deal with the worst-case scenarios.

In 2015 came Maggie, the story of a father taking care of his teenage daughter after she’s been infected by a zombie virus. While it gave Arnold Schwarzenegger something to sink his acting chops into post-politics, it didn’t get the warmest of reactions.

Now it’s the turn of Cargo…

After a pandemic has spread across Australia turning the infected into flesh eating zombies within forty-eight hours of infection, a man bitten by his undead spouse must find someone to take care of their infant daughter, before he too is deader than a dead thing that isn’t quite dead.

Cargo is based on a seven-minute short film made back in 2013, which also goes by the name Cargo. A film which currently has 14.5 million views on YouTube, and that’s just on it’s official channel, if you take into account the unofficial ones and the reaction videos it’s much closer to 16 million.

Don’t worry if you’re one of those millions who’ve seen the short, while all it’s elements are present within the feature version, they’re interwoven in such a way that each moment is greatly improved, the finale for instance has a much greater emotional impact, due in part to the time we’ve spent with Martin Freeman’s father figure and partly due to the relationship with is Aboriginal ward.

Obviously if you haven’t seen the short, watch the feature first, no need for self-spoilers here.

It’s great to see a much treaded troupe given a new spin, and for a zombie movie it’s much less about the shuffling corpses with an appetite for people burgers, and much about how people treat each other in when the going gets tough…and is there anywhere else that looks simultaneously beautiful and desolate as the Australian wilderness?

Have you seen Cargo yet? What did you think? Has it brought new life to the undead? Let me know in comments below.