Prospect (2018)

In a ramshackle, lived-in kind of future. Damon (Jay Duplass) and his teenage daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) work as nomadic miners and prospectors. Apparently, the thing to exploit workers in the future is the return of an old trick: renting them their equipment – in this case a drop capsule that can make it from orbit to a planet or moon and back again and which turns out to be in a deplorable state – and controlling their way of travelling – said ship where they have basically rented a docking bay – clearly only leaving the miners just enough to live on and stay just desperate enough to be willing to take terrible risks. And even though the film isn’t explicitly saying it, you can bet the prospectors are paid only a fracture of what the things they are risking their lives for are worth.

Damon, popped up on pills and desperation, is hoping for the one score that’d make them rich. There’s really no time for proper preparation or planning on how to get to the particularly rich claim he has made a deal for – the toxic and heavily pollinated (nope, I don’t mean polluted) moon they have been working for a while is more or less mined out (goodbye, alien ecosystem), so the ship that’s carrying them and other people of their kind is just going to make one final orbit around the star system before it leaves, never to return. And clearly, it’s not going to wait if some freelancer or other doesn’t make it back on time.

Cee’s not happy at all with her father’s plan for one last drop in the time their carrier ship will take for that orbit, but then, there’s little love lost between the two anyway, thanks to the way of life Damon has landed them in, and his pretty obvious lack of care for his daughter and her basic safety. Her being a teenager hardly comes into the equation here, so certainly isn’t helping matters.

Not surprisingly, their capsule barely makes the landing and might not fly again. Even less surprisingly, Damon’s desperation and stupidity get the two into even deeper trouble, particularly once they meet those most terrible of creatures – other people (in particular a character played by Pedro Pascal). In the end, Cee will have to find some way to survive the troubles her father made for her, as well as the natural and human dangers of the moon.

Christopher Cadwell’s and Zeek Earl’s Prospect is one hell of a low budget indie SF movie, presenting the kind of working class – really working poor – future the more space operatic or the more out there films in the genre could not deliver for most of the genre’s history. And while I love an exciting space adventure with galaxy saving and so on, I’m always happy to encounter films that realize that it’s perfectly okay to tell a story about events that just threaten and change the private worlds of a handful of characters instead of the whole of existence.

That sort of thing is even better when it is as well realized as Prospect is, with worldbuilding that doesn’t need reams of exposition because the writers (also Cadwell and Earl) are willing and able to imply and suggest things about the world their film takes place in, letting the audience fill in the blanks about how things work. Obviously, this kind of approach lives and dies on the filmmakers providing not only the right amount of detail but also simply the right details to show. Prospect is pretty damn flawless in this regard, building a world out of a handful of lines of dialogue, a couple of special effects, and an awesome hand at using and creating just the right props to make the whole thing feel like it’s taking place in a world with its own history without needing to tell the audience this history or how the world works.

In part, the film does this by using elements of the US gold rush – and the audience’s knowledge about it – also giving the film a bit of a Western vibe in the process. It’s convincingly done, with the old school capitalist materialistic nastiness of the gold rush and its exploitation of the hopes and the lives of the poor for the gain of the few feeling like a probable and realistic way the exploitation of resources in outer space might go, if things down here don’t radically change. The Western vibe, for its part, is never overplayed, mostly working to place the film on the kind of frontier civilization hasn’t quite reached, all the better, cheaper, and nastier to exploit the resources at hand. None of which the film ever explicitly states, but suggests through characterization and detail.

The production design that also assumes a large part of the responsibility for the film’s quality is spot-on, making the objects the characters use at once logical and practical looking and clearly in their world so cheaply produced and often used they barely hold together. There’s a reason the only man-made thing in the whole film that looks as if it were made with an idea of beauty are the headphones Cee uses to shut out the world and listen to music, well, actually several reasons, because the film does tend to use its moving parts for more than one thing at the same time. The scenes on the moon are obviously shot in a forest on Earth, but with a bit of digital magic for the skies, a bit of pollen, and an eye for finding places in nature that look unearthly, the directors turn it into a convincing place somewhere else. Sure, it’s not the place of CGI dreams, but the more palpable feel of actual locations does add a layer of veracity instead of destroying an illusion.

Veracity is one of the film’s great virtues anyhow. This is one of those films where technology and the way people use it seem to make an innate sense, and even if the viewer doesn’t initially understand every step of what the characters do when they are mining, the film also gives the full impression that there is a reason for each of these steps the filmmakers have actually thought about. That sounds like a little thing, but does actually do wonders to convince a viewer of the reality of what is going on before them.

The character work is just as strong, again working from bases an audience will probably recognize but always going in the right directions from there without feeling the need to fill in all the blanks about the characters. We never quite do learn how much of a bastard Pedro Pascal’s Ezra is or isn’t (the film does something pleasantly ambiguous with his potential redemption arc), for example, or what Cee will feel about the fate of her father once she has gotten back to safety. We learn other things, though, like how Cee survives in her own head in a world that doesn’t give a damn about people like her.

Thatcher’s performance is strong throughout, really as good as anything you’d expect from an actress her age and with limited experience, not wallowing in the standards of teenage grumpiness even when her character is indeed a teenager and unhappy. She’s never putting it on too thick, every decision and emphasis seems just right. The rest of the cast is on the same level (and therefor much better than you’d expect from a film quite this indie), but then, this is a film that does manage to get people like Sheila Vand, Andre Royo and Jay Duplass for small but not unimportant parts, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.


If I do sound rather excited and positive about the film, that’s because Prospect is such a damn exciting and artistically successful movie, not the kind that will have many people dazzled – and more’s the pity – but one that quietly and calmly simply does everything right it sets out to do.