Pedro Pascal is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He’s the current “face” of Star Wars. He played Joel in HBO’s The Last of Us show, and he’ll appear this December in Avengers: Doomsday as Mister Fantastic. He’s come a long way from his scene-stealing supporting role as Oberyn Martell on the fourth season of Game of Thrones.

In the midst of all that, Pascal made a little-seen sci-fi film called Prospect, and it might be one of the best of his career.

Prospect is sci-fi Western done right

Danger on the final frontier

A lot of people have taken stabs at making “sci-fi westerns” over the years, with mixed results. Firefly remains a beloved one-season marvel to this day, while HBO’s Westworld descended into incoherence and died in darkness. Prospect threads the needle just right.

The movie follows a father (Jay Duplass) and daughter (Sophie Thatcher) as they land on a distant moon in search for valuable gems. Soon enough, they run into other prospectors after the same thing. It’s hard to trust people in the old west in space, and a fight breaks out. Soon enough, the daughter, Cee, finds herself needing to team up with one of the other prospectors, Ezra (Pascal), in order to make it off the planet.

From there, the two are on a quest for survival and, if possible, riches. I won’t spoil everything, but a lot of the enjoyment comes from watching the evolving dynamic between Cee and Ezra. Is he genuinely trustworthy, or is he simply better than the worst thing that could have possibly happened to her? Their fragile bond keeps getting tested, like in a scene where they encounter some local villagers and try to buy medical supplies off of them. Cee eventually drops her anger and opens up a bit to Ezra, and you don’t know whether to be glad things are thawing between them or scared that she’s showing him a vulnerability he can exploit.

In short, Prospect crackles with the tension you’ll find in the best westerns, and none of it feels forced into the sci-fi setting.

Prospect is low-budget in the best way

The movie turns its lack of resources into an advantage

One of the reasons that Prospect never became a giant hit is because it was made on the cheap by an independent studio. It never got a lot of press, but writer-directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell make the absolute most of the resources they have.

It can be hard for sci-fi movies to have a sense of lived-in reality; the tendency is for everything to look slick and sleek. But the dusty future of Prospect has a lot of grit under its fingernails. The spaceships look a little like motorhomes on the inside, and the spacesuits that Ezra and Cee have to wear are faded and bulky, making it hard for the people wearing them to move. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of this idea, because they have to wear these spacesuits whenever they’re on the surface of the moon, which has a toxic atmosphere. A gunshot is dangerous in the best of times, and doubly so when it could puncture your threadbare spacesuit and expose you to the elements.

The movie also does a great job of world-building without being showy about it. Near the start, Cee and her father, Damon, go through the process of extracting valuable resources from a creature that lives underneath the surface of this moon. They go through the process without explaining it, but we can tell they’ve done this a lot. That’s one of many details that makes the world feel bigger than it is, despite the fact that the producers can’t afford elaborate special effects. The hand-crafted aspects of this movie — the production design, the costumes, and even the language — say as much or more than a huge space battle possibly could.

See Pedro Pascal (right) before he got big

Sophie Thatcher is also fantastic

Prospect came out in 2018, a couple of years after Pedro Pascal broke out in Game of Thrones and right before he debuted as Din Djarin in The Mandalorian. These days, Pascal seems nigh-ubiquitous, but back here, he was still building his career.

Like always, he throws himself into the role and does a great job of channeling the Western archetype of the charming, dangerous stranger who may or may not have a heart of gold. His lazy southern drawl is also memorable, just extreme enough to be believable without pushing the movie into campy territory. Sophie Thatcher might be even better. She tells us a lot about Cee’s emotions even as she tries to remain guarded. Thatcher went onto play the lead roles in movies like The Boogeyman, Heretic, and Companion. Watching her in Prospect feels like watching a movie star take her first steps.

Watch Prospect for free

At only 100 minutes long, Prospect is a quick watch. And better yet: you don’t need to subscribe to anything to see it. You can watch Prospect for free right now on YouTube, Tubi, PLEX, and The Roku Channel. And if you already have Hulu, you can watch it there, as well.

Release Date

October 2, 2018

Runtime

98 Minutes

Director

Zeek Earl, Christopher Caldwell