Prospect
Produced by: Andrew Miano, Chris Weit, Scott Glassgold, Dan Balgoyen, Garrick Dion, Matthias Mellinghaus
Written by: Zeek Earl & Chris Caldwell
Starring
Sophie Thatcher as Cee
Pedro Pascal as Ezra
Jay Duplass as Damon
Andre Royo as Oruf
Sheila Vand as Inumon
Anwan Glover as Mikken
Prospect is a well-crafted science fiction film that shows you can construct a plausible world with agreeably alien features without a nine-figure budget or half the computing power in Silicon Valley.
The plot is straightforward enough; a prospector and his teen age daughter land on a lush but highly toxic world (“Green”) to prospect for rare and extremely difficult-to-extract jewels. The father has determined there is a mother lode (“the queen’s lair”) at one site, and they proceed towards that locale. Their landing pod malfunctions, and they land a fair distance from the lair, and have to traverse the poisonous forests of Green. They encounter other prospectors who are not unduly burdened with morals or ethics, and a fight ensues. This leaves the survivors of the melée to a) get rich and b) get home. Green presents enough challenges without other prospectors also searching the queen’s lair.
The characters aren’t particularly profound (well, prospecting doesn’t attract deep thinkers—quite the opposite, in fact) but they are engaging. Ezra (Pedro Pascal) is particularly notable because he uses a similar pseudo-formality and archaic language structure employed by Nathan Fillion and others in the short-lived “Firefly” series. It gives him an air of polite roguishness that’s both disarming and deceiving.
Cee (Tucker) comes across as your typical vapid blonde teen, but as the story unfolds, shows resilience, toughness and adaptability in a very credible manner. It’s an outstanding role, and Thatcher fills it nicely.
The other characters, all human, are agreeably different from us, including a prisoner who is being slowly executed, and a mute gang leader who displays her displeasure with the conversation around her by flooding the suit transceivers with loud and obnoxious music.
As prospecting movies go, Jack London would give this a thumbs-up, and it’s certainly one of the best SF movies we’ll see this year.
Now on Netflix.