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Prospect begins with our heroine, Cee, curled up in an unused corner of a spaceship, writing in a notebook in a strange script. In fact, all the writing that we see in the movie will be in this unreadable script, which is sprinkled throughout with similar unobtrusive bits of foreign visual culture, like the six-legged cartoon alien on Cee’s sweatshirt that later shows up as a figurine.
You feel that this is a popular character, perhaps her world’s version of Tweety Bird or Iron Man - the movie never feels the need to spell it out more clearly than that. All of Prospect is like this: sparing in exposition (but never to the point of creating confusion for confusion’s sake), but so rich in set-dressing that it becomes one of the most atmospheric science fiction movies I’ve seen for some time.
The film also has a stunning natural setting: the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington stands in for the alien planet, a lush and beautiful temperate rainforest rendered uncanny by the motes of dust drifting through all the outdoor shots. They look gorgeous, like the specks of dust that you can sometimes see drifting through the sunshine coming through a window.
But this dust is deadly as well as beautiful: the characters all wear spacesuits with air filters, and when one of the suits is ruptured by a gunshot that also inflicts a wound, that character ends up losing an arm to the resulting damage from the dust.
The movie is not only atmospheric and beautiful, but tensely suspenseful as well. When the story starts, Cee and her father Damon are just about to leave the large space shuttle in their small pod to go down to the surface. They’ve come, Cee discovers only as they begin their descent, on the very last shuttle surface out to this remote moon. The line is about to close. Cee and her father have three cycles to find the gems, extract them, make it back to their ship and up into orbit to meet the shuttle - or they’ll be stranded on this planet with no way to get home.
( Spoilers )
Unlike most of the other movies at the film festival, this one is soon to get a theatrical release: Prospect will be in Regal Cinemas on November 2. Worth seeing if you get the chance.
You feel that this is a popular character, perhaps her world’s version of Tweety Bird or Iron Man - the movie never feels the need to spell it out more clearly than that. All of Prospect is like this: sparing in exposition (but never to the point of creating confusion for confusion’s sake), but so rich in set-dressing that it becomes one of the most atmospheric science fiction movies I’ve seen for some time.
The film also has a stunning natural setting: the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington stands in for the alien planet, a lush and beautiful temperate rainforest rendered uncanny by the motes of dust drifting through all the outdoor shots. They look gorgeous, like the specks of dust that you can sometimes see drifting through the sunshine coming through a window.
But this dust is deadly as well as beautiful: the characters all wear spacesuits with air filters, and when one of the suits is ruptured by a gunshot that also inflicts a wound, that character ends up losing an arm to the resulting damage from the dust.
The movie is not only atmospheric and beautiful, but tensely suspenseful as well. When the story starts, Cee and her father Damon are just about to leave the large space shuttle in their small pod to go down to the surface. They’ve come, Cee discovers only as they begin their descent, on the very last shuttle surface out to this remote moon. The line is about to close. Cee and her father have three cycles to find the gems, extract them, make it back to their ship and up into orbit to meet the shuttle - or they’ll be stranded on this planet with no way to get home.
( Spoilers )
Unlike most of the other movies at the film festival, this one is soon to get a theatrical release: Prospect will be in Regal Cinemas on November 2. Worth seeing if you get the chance.
