Prospect (2018)

I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning this movie back when it released in 2018. I don’t know what it was about this movie, but it ended up being far less known than I would have expected. It is not the biggest budget movie ever so perhaps they did not do much in the way of advertising. I would never really notice as I try to limit my exposure to ads as much as possible.

The thing I like most about this movie is its beautiful retrofutrism style and its strange alien like color saturated forests. This movie felt like it was as much an art project as it was a story. The details of the spacesuits, weapons, spaceships are what I’d expect of a modern day recreation of what people would have designed as a science fiction in the past. In other words if the current level of film making technology was possible 50+ years ago this is what I’d expect a science fiction of the time to look like. I may be a little biased here, but I think the color palette of this movie is the most beautiful of any that I’ve ever seen. Perhaps Blade Runner 2047 would be greater simply due its greater diversity of environments.

The plot of this movie involves the characters Cee and her father Damon who are rare gem prospectors. While attempting to descend from the space station to their designated prospecting site they encounter a malfunction and end up stranded far away from their intended location. Without any immediate way off the planet they decide to prospect the area and quickly find a rare gem. Despite the gem being enough to make their endeavor worthwhile Damon insists continuing to the intended prospecting location. However, it seems they eventually push their luck too far when they encounter some mercenaries.

I like that this movie seems to know exactly what it is trying to be. There are no plots to nowhere, irrelevant characters, plot armor or contrived nonsense in attempts to drive the movie forward. Everything makes sense and is relatively straight forward. The science fiction themes of this movie while beautiful are technically not critical to the plot. I imagine this movies plot could be nearly identical if it were taking place in the old west during the gold rush. This kind of science fiction isn’t usually something I’d rate so highly as it is primarily about the characters and their journey, but their no nonsense approach made it far more enjoyable. Sometimes you have a science fiction where its technology or setting is absolutely critical to telling the story you are trying to tell and other times it is putting a plot that would make sense in modern day Earth and putting it in space or the future and this is definitely the latter.

I hope more movies or TV series get made in this retrofuturistic style.