Review: Prospect (2018)

Prospect (2018)

Rated R for some violence/bloody images

Score: 3 out of 5

Prospect is a nifty little sci-fi Western that's driven by its vivid and lived-in world, an aesthetic straight out of the '70s, and a great performance from Pedro Pascal, enough to make up for its plodding pace and fairly dull heroine. Writers and directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell clearly shared a love for classic '70s science fiction films like Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as new-school films like Moon and Looper that hearken back to those same inspirations, and while the story they wrote doesn't do much beyond tell a pretty basic story of survival, the visuals they crafted do more than enough legwork to propel this film. It's an offbeat entry that's worth checking out for those who prefer sci-fi films that are more about the journey and characters than the action and effects, even if other recent films of this kind outshine it.

Damon and Cee are a father and daughter who travel to an alien moon on a contract to mine rare gems, harvesting them from bizarre, underground-dwelling alien creatures that create them as an organic byproduct. Down there, however, they encounter a man named Ezra who behaves in a hostile manner, and when Damon attempts to rob him, both Damon and Ezra's partner are killed, leaving only Cee and Ezra alone trying to survive on a hostile world with a toxic atmosphere. The two are forced to work together to make their escape and find the big haul that Damon came for, contending with both scavengers living on the planet and a team of mercenaries who are there on their own mission, all without knowing whether they can trust each other.

The best part of this film is easily the care put into its world-building and its visual design. Despite clearly being shot in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the setting still feels truly alien in a way that countless made-in-Vancouver sci-fi movies and TV shows often fail to do. While its atmosphere is breathable without an oxygen tank, the air is thick with some sort of dust that, while never fully explained, leaves no doubt that it is harmful to human life, even before we see a character exposed to it and almost killed; you buy right away why everybody needs to wear spacesuits. Speaking of, the technology is utilitarian, from the analog instrument panels on the spaceship to protective suits with air filters that look lifted from a '70s Chevy. Even the blasters the characters wield look crude and clunky, with energy magazines that are charged with a hand-crank generator. Everything feels like it was built not to look cool for a movie or an Apple product debut, but like it was actually designed to handle the rigors of outer space without getting fried by solar flares or other such anomalies. The environment down on the moon, largely devoid of life outside of a few colorful characters, feels lifted out of a spaghetti Western and sent to outer space, with abandoned mining operations, a hostile atmosphere, and even a camp of former miners who've stayed behind to eke out an existence. Little things throughout the film provide hints as to the polyglot culture of outer space, from the strange script that some of the writing is in to the Russian pop song that somebody plays to harass Cee and Ezra. At the center of it all is Pedro Pascal, the MVP of this film's minimalist cast by a long shot. As Ezra, he does a great job creating a roguish character who we don't know whether we can trust, who we fear might backstab Cee at any opportunity in order to get his ticket off this rock, especially given how his first meeting with Damon and Cee happened under some terrible circumstances. As basically a shadier version of Han Solo, Pascal demonstrates why he got the lead role in the upcoming The Mandalorian show for Disney's new streaming service.

I wish I could say the same about Cee, however. While Sophie Thatcher is likable enough in the role, she doesn't do much to elevate it above the writing the way that Pascal did with Ezra, largely tagging along and telling Ezra about the big score she and her father were looking for. The crux of the film's story hinged on the ersatz father-daughter relationship between Ezra and Cee, and I was never able to fully buy into it. The lack of dialogue and communication between them was a big problem in this regard, the film relying a bit too heavily on visual storytelling without providing us much insight into who these people are. As such, as I was watching these characters, the film often felt like it was keeping its distance from me, asking me to admire it from afar but not letting me appreciate it much beyond its surface pleasures. The moments when it got Ezra and Cee interacting, like when Cee had to perform emergency surgery on Ezra after he was injured, were too few and far between. I think of movies like Logan, and video games like The Last of Us, that were built around similar relationships, and Ezra and Cee just came up short. And since 90% of the movie is built around them, it served as a major crack in my ability to get invested in the story.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, however, this film's aesthetic charms and a great performance from Pascal outweigh its problems and produce a solid future-set version of something like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It's worth checking out for fans of both "thinking man's" science fiction and old-school dramatic thrillers.