My streaming gem: why you should watch Prospect | Science fiction and fantasy films | The Guardian

could there be gold in those flowing hills? Scrolling through your favorite movie service in search of something new but also good can make you feel like a curmudgeonly vermin from the Wild West scouring the trash for hidden treasure. It’s nice, then, that the perspective of the sci-fi miner’s tale, an understated but superbly realized tale of survival on a distant frontier, is a streaming gem where the characters are driven by the quest for glittering gems. /p>

On a remote alien moon where the mottled atmosphere is so dangerous it requires pressure suits and air filters to navigate, a stressed-out single father (jay duplass) drags his young daughter cee (sophie thatcher) up a mountain. risk prospecting expedition. after a crash landing in their cramped space capsule, the pair have a limited window to sniff out valuable organic gems. after three “cycles”, the interstellar gateway that left them will head home. if they lose their lift, they’ll be stranded in this lush desert with only a musket-shaped dart gun for protection.

The gems are encased in clumpy alien egg sacs, but collecting them is a stressful procedure that requires a steady scalpel hand: dig sites are combustible, and cutting a sack incorrectly causes the treasure to spoil and spoil. The fact that the nervous parent seems to prefer stimulant-infused gum to try harder doesn’t fill you with confidence. Cee, who we first meet in a daydream wearing headphones scribbling cryptic pictograms like a typically disaffected teenager, seems skeptical about everything even before his father reveals that they’re searching for a mythical bonanza dubbed the queen’s lair. p>

That’s when pedro pascal enters the picture as the roguish ezra, and if there was any doubt that this was an old-fashioned western transposed into a sci-fi setting, his smug cadences and languid, low cunning bring everything into focus. . . Before long, it’s just Ezra and Cee trying to survive “in the green,” having forged a tentative alliance based on survival. “A good partnership is only achieved by sincere speech,” Ezra advises in one of his many folksy proclamations, but though they are literally tied together to sustain life, their alliance is shaky, especially when the verdant jungle might not be so uninhabited. as a first thought. if their slim chance of escape rests on trusting each other, there are plenty of showdowns and negotiations, as well as some tooth-licking scenes of amateur field surgery, to get through first.

The prickly human motivations of this minimalist story contrast with the dazed setting, a hallucinatory yet tangible alien forest that evokes the eerie mulch land of alex garland’s annihilation (another sci-fi wonder released in 2018). Prospect’s evocative effects work, which includes a throwaway shot of a caterpillar rendered startlingly alien thanks to some subtle cgi, is one piece with its frugal yet evocative production design. Everything in Cee’s dilapidated space capsule seems to have been created with a real-world purpose in mind. If you’re the kind of person who stops to marvel at the design and iconography of the various control panels of the nostromo, there’s a lot to unpack here, too. the term “worldbuilding” is sometimes used pejoratively to criticize blockbuster movies that seem more interested in setting up potential sequels or spin-offs than telling their story. Prospect creates his own perfectly realized sci-fi snow globe that manages to be aesthetically intriguing without drawing too much attention away from his life-or-death situation. the world seems real and therefore the stakes too.

what makes the prospect really sing is the conflicting chemistry between cee and ezra, the odd couple who slowly begin to appreciate each other’s hidden talents. who knows if jon favreau or any of the other creative talents behind the mandalorian saw prospect in the initial release and were surprised by pascal’s ability to communicate emotion even through a two-way radio transmission in a bulky helmet. In any case, it now looks like a warm-up for his bounty hunter escapade. Her co-star Thatcher also recently joined the Star Wars universe as a cyber street punk in the Boba Fett book (although she has much more to do in the animated survival series Yellow Jackets, where she plays Juliette Lewis’s teenage version of Natalie). ). That these two artists have moved on to higher-profile projects isn’t surprising, but it’s unclear what Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl, the writers/directors of Prospect, are working on. whatever it is, I’ll be looking for it avidly.

• prospect is available on hulu in the us. uu. and prime video in the UK