Review: Prospect – “A clever, low-fi pieces of science fiction tinged with the Western”

Directed by Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl
Starring Sophie Thatcher, Pedro Pascal, Jay Duplass

Prospect is one of those small-budget, Indy films that can all too easily slip by without you noticing, and that would be a shame because this is a very interesting wee science fiction piece, which also borrows liberally from the Western genre. Cee (Sophie Thatcher) and Damon (Jay Duplass), are a daughter and father team of prospectors, with a lot in common with the classic image of the Old West prospectors, except instead of a wagon train they hitch a ride on a space freighter, and rather than a pack mule they have a basic “drop pod”, a small capsule (not a proper ship) which is both cramped home for them and which takes them down to the planet at the end of their hitch on the freighter.

Cee is young and clearly starting to chafe at the itinerant lifestyle, tramping cargo class through space on long hauls to find one place where they can land and try to eke out a living. As the film opens she’s trying to find some space of her own, out of that cramped capsule, prowling the adjoining freighter, listening to music on her headphones. Thatcher conveys well that frustration of being young, of only knowing one, narrow kind of life but yearning for something, anything more, but not sure what or how. Her father, though, is excited, he is convinced that they finally have the jump on other prospectors, the big score, the one that will earn them so much they will finally be set up, and she reluctantly follows because what else does she have?

Naturally, things do not go as smoothly as planned. As Cee and her father start to explore for their big score, they are ambushed by another pair of less than friendly prospectors, who demand whatever they have at gunpoint. And there are others here and there on this otherwise uninhabited planet, few of them any more friendly than these bushwhackers. Prospect soon becomes as much as about trying to survive on a hostile alien world, with equally hostile humans all after the same harvest our prospectors are looking for, as it is a quest to make that One Big Score. And of course, I am not going to say any more about how that pans out for fear of spoilers.

Prospect grew out of a short film by Caldwell and Earl, which established the look and feel of this universe, which the feature draws on. This is no Star Trek, gleaming future of a post-scarcity society, this is the rugged frontier, where people scratch a hard living from an unforgiving universe. No mighty warp-vessels here, scratched and dented old freighters that have to obey the laws of physics, a long, slow haul looping around their various planets to release drop pods and landers, that are then stuck there until the ship’s return loop (and if you miss that, you’re marooned). This is a blue-collar future of hard-work, trying to keep the wolves from the door any way you can, it looks lived in, hard-lived in – it has more in common with the worn working space of the Nostromo in Alien than it does the Enterprise.

I mentioned the Western tropes that are woven into Prospect, and that extends beyond a science fiction version of those old-time prospectors into the style – Ezra (Pedro Pascal), one of the others who try to get the jump on Cee and Damon, talks in a very stylised, loquacious manner, the verbose style used for more than a few Western characters who like to talk all high-falutin’. Pascal, who you may have seen in Game of Thrones or Kingsman 2, delivers a very nuanced take on his character, taking him from the verbally dextrous but ruthless bushwhacker to something more as the film progresses, crafting a believable, three-dimensional character rather than just some cut-out villain. Stand-out performance here, however, is Sophie Thatcher as Cee; Cee is in almost every single scene in the film, she is its spine, carrying the entire movie, and it is a terrific performance, all the more remarkable given it is her film debut and she was only seventeen years old at the time.

This is a clever, low-fi pieces of science fiction tinged with the Western, that works past its small budget with good ideas and locations, and some terrific performances from the leads. As I said at the start, it is too easy for small movies like this to slip by us without noticing them – no big press budget to shout them out, and it’s a shame because this sort of indie film-making is where we often find little gems like this.

You can view it on iTunes.