padimore99 After watching the film to the end, i launched myself off the chair, toward the television and returned to the beginning - so i could reassure myself that the word 'based on true events' had been written there. He (Alexey balbanov) may have been messing with us or not, but then the complete repulsiveness and disbelief at the fact that human beings are capable of such things, was the most riveting thing. The film and characters deliver a slice of outright realism, social decay, dark and twisted tales i have ever seen. And nowadays in times unsurprising storytelling, this film shocked the hell out of me. It wasn't the disgust of Captain Zhurov nor the helplessness of Angelika (my name-sake) that irritated me, but the sheer intertwining and coincidence that could be experienced in the film. Everyone crossed everyone else's path. This, like others have said, is a very very dark, sick, twisted movie... in a good way. That it keeps you interested and intrigued. I loved it, only with an open mind.

vitaky2001 Here is what Balabanov wants to tell us. "Russian people" (Aleksey) drinks, believes in God and dreams of the City of the Sun. "Russian people" sat in prison in the past (reference to the Gulag) and remains indebted to "political regime" (Captain Zhurov). The latter of course is a mockery of the Soviet propaganda's idea that people "owe" a lot to Soviet power. Zhurov commits a crime by killing a Vietnamese (which can be read as the regime's crimes against the non-Russians), but it is the "people" (Aleksey) who become inculpated and executed. "Remember, you owe me something," says Captain Zhurov ("political regime") to Aleksey ("the people"). "Russia" is represented simultaneously as a mother (Captain Zhurov's alcoholic mother), a wife (Antonina, Aleksey's wife) and a bride (Angelica). Political regime turns "Russia-as-mother" into a hopeless degenerate (through alcohol and TV addiction). Then, political regime turns "Russia-as-wife" into a widow (the execution of Aleksey – "the people") and finally it violates "Russia-as-bride". It first presents "Russia-as-bride" with a dead corpse of her bride-groom (paratrooper killed in Afghanistan (or Chechnia?)). Since, "political regime" (and Captain Zhurov) is sexually impotent and cannot substitute the bride-groom, it has an ugly criminal (urka) violate "Russia-as-bride" (Angelika) and then completes the girl's torment by reading her the letters of the dead fiancée (Soviet propaganda's cynical play on the sacred feelings?). "Political regime" professes love to "Russia-as-bride" but opines that this love is unrequited. Antonina ("Russia-as-widow") kills Captain Zhurov (a reference to Russian rebellion), but that of course does not restore the lost purity of Angelica ("Russia-as-bride") Russian rebellion is, after all, bloody and senseless. The crucial thing is that the story does not show the way towards redemption. The teacher of "scientific atheism" (Artem) comes to the Church to be baptized, but the sacrament (if it really happened) remains off-screen. The bottom-line is that political regime is a sadist violator from which there is no escape. In the end, what effect did the director seek to achieve with such a representation? Only one: he wanted the viewer to have the feeling that it is he or she who has (is) been violated. Both the rape featured in this film and the symbolic rape that is stands for, serve to obscure the fact that the actual rape happens in the course of watching the film and that the real rapist is not Zhurov (political regime) or its proxy (criminal), but the film itself. Its goal is to turn the people watching it into a raped subject and thereby complete the material, moral and psychological destruction that the country has experienced for a quarter of a century. It imposes upon the viewer a socio-political imagery (characters and relations between them) which deranges the mind, paralyzes the will and renders meaningless any action. It is the deadliest film I have seen in my life. It should have been cut to pieces and its director placed into a mental asylum, for, needless to say, the fantasy of inescapable rape could emerge only in a profoundly diseased mind.

Pascal Zinken (LazySod) The title of the film is a code name for the return home of a body from the battle field. The reason why this title is chosen becomes clear early in the film - but the build of the film would allow a lot of different titles and each one of them would be matching for this film goes far beyond a body returning from the battle field. As the story rolls the film switches back and forth between a number of people and tells their respective tales - and the way all of them connect in one way or the other. The stories are not altogether happy but are not too dark either so the film doesn't turn too dreary. It is very grim though. As each of the stories turns to its conclusion one can not escape the biting cold reality of them.Played out well enough to be believable and quick enough to be entertaining this film does pretty well. It's ending is fitting, its after-taste is bitter. But, above all, it's an interesting watch.8 out of 10 broken bottles of vodka

A C Mr. Balabanov's latest work was tagged as "not for the squeamish", and it certainly lived up to that claim. Any other achievements? Up for debate. Perhaps for some the abundance of gratuitous gruesomeness in the bleak setting of industrial U.S.S.R town combined with some well-selected rock tunes makes for a masterpiece or at least for powerful film-making. For me Cargo 200 was a movie which hesitated for half of it whether to tell us about the gloom of the Soviet 80s, or about pointlessness of the war (whether as a literal tale of Afghan or an allegory for Chechnya), or about a professor of scientific atheism starting to question his beliefs in the times of glasnost before eventually deciding to go to its main storyline: Captain Zhurov's perverted affection for a young daughter of high-ranking communist official. Captain Zhurov appears out of nowhere (10 second shot of his creepy face excluded), right of the bat commits several highly disturbing acts of violence, and proceeds in similar vein throughout the rest of the movie . Balabanov himself said that, paraphrasing his words, the movie was about a different (read highly crazy) man falling in love and trying to conquer the girl's heart with unconventional techniques. Well, the center story that was told in the movie could have happened anywhere, which one could argue suggests theme's universality, but combined with the amount of detail devoted to recreation of the feel of 80's USSR is nothing but incongruous. Even the title of the movie, Cargo 200, bears little relation to the plot, aside from the fact that Cargo 200 contains the girl's fiancé whose dead body is unceremoniously dumped next to her. Mr. Balabanov is without a doubt a talented director, who says he alternates between big projects like Brat and the edgy/artsy ones like Cargo. Lets just hope his next commercial movie is better than this one.