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.
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