Alien Cargo
Alien Cargo
| 28 January 1999 (USA)
Alien Cargo Trailers

After eight months of hyper-sleep, when Christopher 'Chris' McNiel (Jason London) and Theta Kaplan (Missy Crider) of a Mars cargo transport ship the Solar System Shipping Vessel No.17 (Triple S-17) awaken, they find out something has gone terribly wrong. They've woken up from hyper-sleep almost ten months past their scheduled time, find the ship's internals badly damaged, off course and almost no fuel. What's more, it's discovered the first shift killed each other. As the plot unfolds, something truly evil is discovered on board - an alien biological life form which can psychologically manipulate humans.

Reviews
Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.
Sexylocher Masterful Movie
Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.
quasides have to totally agree with kcwellswell i think the only problem of the movie was it didn't really know where to go.it started like alien but nonono, no space alien horror is coming there (thank god). plot twist turned it into space survival. nice surprise sadly it couldn't really take of from there. also the key factors - the deceases and the alien cargo still played a minor role, a starting point for the space survival plot.the plot wasn't very thick. its hard enough to transport the tensions in a space emergency situation, even harder in such a futuristic environment. but in this movie it didn't really came across at all.thats sad, because as kcwells already said it was technically very good. resonable believable characters - i hate those movies where people are bitten by a zombie and don't tell the group in self denial just to bring everybody in danger - here they act more logic, no they did it heroicit was a great, not so much happy end, partly uncertain partly certain death and still left not a bad feeling.sadly the movie was missing atmosphere too. the alien plot was to quick,not mysterious enough, to much boring space survival... and still i cant rate this movie under 6to - finally - too good the technical aspects, the actors also deserve 6.5-7. no nonsense just a bit better writing and this could have been a real bombatic movieand if we consider this one was a TV its even more surprising. a 7 seven to compensate unjustified poor rating, a honest 6-6.5
Leofwine_draca ALIEN CARGO certainly has a wicked little story going for it. It involves the crew of a "deep space trucking company", all but two of whom are put into hypersleep for the most part of a year in order to cut down on costs. During a seemingly ordinary trip, two of the sleepers wake up to discover they've slept too long and their ship is now way off course. The members who are supposed to be on active duty are missing. Even worse, they don't have a great deal of fuel or oxygen left...With that premise it's hard to get things wrong and ALIEN CARGO boasts a fine and spooky atmosphere, at least for the first half. I love the sense of foreboding that's carefully built up, and the unknown menace lurking in the background. The acting, from Jason London and Missy Crider, isn't too bad by genre standards either.What a shame, then, that things fall apart in the second half when the source of the mystery is finally explained and it all becomes rather humdrum. It's at this point where the acting falls flat and the sense of menace dissipates in favour of TV movie cheesiness. The moral-flavoured climax is a little better, and I appreciate the downbeat ending, but in the end this is a film lesser than the sum of its parts. Watch out for NEIGHBOURS star Alan Dale (Jim!) as a hard-ass rival crew member.
Rob_Taylor For a TV movie, and a SciFi Channel one at that, I believe, this was a very pleasant surprise.Once you make the adjustment to the low-budget effects and graphics, and start paying attention to the story, it all hangs together very nicely.What's more, the plot is nicely handled. There aren't any crazy monsters, people behave in a sensible fashion, basic physics is obeyed and nothing jumps out at you as horribly inept. In short, the writer had more than a basic grasp of the environment the movie is set in.Acting is passable, though Jason London will never be an A lister, and the plot progresses logically and without much contrivance at all.In short, cheap though it is, Alien Cargo never offends the intellect. The beginning drags a little, but bear with it because it improves constantly as it goes along.I was particularly pleased to see the use of a non-happy ending. They telegraph it fairly heavily from a long way off, but I kept expecting some kind of deus-ex machina to save the day. It never did and the movie is better for it.SUMMARY: A pleasant surprise! Sensible, logical and genuinely likable. If only the more recent SciFi channel productions were as well written. Not ground-breaking, but worthwhile.
kcwells I just watched this movie again, this time on the Sci-Fi channel, and I came on here to see what others thought. Frankly, I'm surprised it has such a low rating on here. It's certainly not flawless, but I think it's actually pretty darn good. There really wasn't anything BAD about it, either--nothing really to complain about at all. The acting was all pretty well done; perhaps not Oscar-winning, but not unbelievable at all. The plot, dialogue, and story all made sense too. The special effects--though there weren't really much of these to comment on--were all better than you'd expect for a movie you'd see on TV, and even the prop corpses looked reasonably as you'd expect them to look. I was impressed at how logical they made it all: the way the cargo system on the ship worked, the way the ship computer interacted with them, the way they moved around outside the ship (it didn't look like they were on strings when they were slightly hovering around), the way they realistically handled all of the situations, everything. Seriously, this movie isn't bad at all. It's certainly not the MOST creative or original movie out there, but I really don't understand why anyone would give it a 4.8/10 (which is the user rating on here at the time of me writing this). Although I would find it hard for someone to say this is their FAVORITE movie, it certainly shouldn't get anything lower than a 6. Personally, I'm giving it a 7. It's entertaining, pretty well acted and written, and it doesn't contain any gratuitous gore, nudity, or foul language either to bring down its quality level. Heck, it's even thought-provoking. *shrugs* I like it, and if you like sci-fi movies (or even if you don't), I bet you'd probably like it too. Don't let the abnormally low user rating scare you, this is a good movie. Oh, and it's not a creature flick either--there are no monsters or aliens or anything to make it hokey. It's a pretty good movie, try it out for yourself.