j* movie reviews 2020

Prospect (2018)

Dad and daughter struggle to get the spice on a distant moon - chaos ensues.

This is a quite delightful low-budget looking sci-fi. Particularly we need to mention all the sets and props... it's not quite steam-punk... it's sort of more 70s punk. Everything is made quite wonderfully out of things with a kind of 80s edge. Like if you went back to the 80s and then imagined now using only the tech that existed. And the costumes are glorious... I really liked the "any space helmet" approach where no two people had the same make of helmet.

Anyway, Dad and teenage daughter go to distant moon - intense timeline to get back off moon because the freighter spaceship they came on is discontinuing the route, so they only have so long to get down, get the job done, and get out.

The job, as it turns out, is to harvest these tricksy gemstones grown by the weird forest. The forest seems to fill the air constantly with dodgy spores, so you can't take you helmets off. And these gems that live in the fleshy-ball roots require very specialised technique or they self destruct. And everyone wants them.

Girl and dad run into danger.... Girl ends up with new dad and they run into more danger. There's a lot of schlopping through forests with washing machine hoses connecting them to each other and their air-filters. There's relaunch mishaps. A little drug indulgence. It gets a bit weirdly Mad Max at one stage, but not with cars.

It's a nice film, visually rather interesting, especially for the aforementioned retro-cool spacesuits and spaceships and technology and weird guns that shoot different. But it's not really a story that went anywhere.

J* gives it 3 stars.

<old review republished from 2019>