Inverse recommended this movie. They got to me through my phone. Their movie selections occasionally pushing up through the soil of political headlines is the most useful part of Apple news. I didn’t read the whole review, sci-fi western was all I needed to hear. No need to color in more than necessary. I did see a picture. A man in a grimy space suit with a space gun pointed at his head. The man looked vaguely like Pedro Pascal.
I sit on the couch next to my girlfriend. She likes space, too. She looks at her phone and tells me they filmed the dust in the guy’s basement. I am incensed. Why would tell me something about the movie? I cool down because it’s not plot related, but then I am consumed by thoughts of this basement dust shoot. Production staff stomping around, beating rugs.
Action!
Maybe it was dusty enough already.
“Which guy?” I say.
“What?”
“You said they shot in the guy’s basement. Which guy?” I ask.
“The guy, the directors (Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl), I don’t know. One of the guys.”
For the record it was Earl. She tells me it was filmed in Washington. Alright, that’s enough.
The movie is dirty. Panels rattle. Electronics pop and smoke. The stars ain’t all that pretty when viewed through a greasy window. And the dust, the dust will kill you. We learn about all of it through a custom, space-western vernacular. Firefly fans welcome. The only other thing I’ll impart is that the guns sound fantastic.
The man in the photograph was indeed Pedro Pascal. His character, Ezra, is one half of this movie. The other half is Sophie Thatcher. Jay Duplass is in there somewhere. Every second Pedro Pascal is on screen in Prospect, The Mandalorian gets worse. He is magnetic. Humble. Wily. To short his electricity behind an expressionless metal mask is an affront. There’s a reason everyone knows the name Harrison Ford and no one knows who played Boba Fett. Quiet, nerds.
The Mandalorian’s mess of clunky, too-short-for-the-genre episodes, are kept aloft by a stuffed animal while holding the stuffed animal, invisible, heard through a cheap microphone, is mutha fuckin’ Pedro Pascal. Or maybe not! Who knows if he’s even in the suit. I bet it’s a stuntman more often than you think. You want to watch a space western, watch Prospect.
I don’t know how movies like this don’t make it to me sooner. All the billions spent on algorithms, targeted advertising… cookies, and somehow this movie is released in 2018 and takes two years to get to my eyeballs. The system doesn’t work. If my apps knew me at all this would have been the only suggestion for weeks.
As a rule, I wait for people to ask me if I’ve seen anything good lately before I tell them, usually after two full minutes of trying to remember a single thing I’ve ever watched in my entire life. Prospect is the kind of movie that makes me start the conversation. “Hey watch Prospect on Netflix.”
“What? Black beans or pinto beans.”
“Pinto.”
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