We could have used some background info
not bad for a low budget indy
shareI really liked it. Didn't need background info. Just a day in the life of a future protector. Science fiction. Not Science fantasy.
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MovieChat Forums > Prospect (2018) Discussion > We could have used some background info
I thought they did an excellent job of baking in a tonne of background info into the general dialogue and situations.
For example, "The Green" that they kept talking about obviously referred to being on-planet, toiling around in spacey isolation and wilderness.
Prospecting is straightforward, isn't it?
Well, some additional backstory would have added more interest.
Honestly, it could have been some narration or some text scroll at the beginning that laid out where they were, how far it was from regularly traveled space, what the deal was with the atmosphere, what those gems were all about...
None of it is firmly necessary, but it feels like lazy writing to leave all that out. It seems like part of the trend of using science fiction as window dressing for a story which, at it's heart, isn't really science fiction.
This entire narrative can (and has) been done as a conventional "road story" with a BS-artist dad, a too-smart-for-her-age daughter, stuck in some small town while dad tries to run a get-rich-quick scheme which backfires and the daughter has to deal with the bad guys and save herself. Paper Moon is the first thing that comes to mind, really.
The actual science fiction backstory gets left out because it doesn't actually exist -- the screenplay was given a science fiction treatment because the tender and heartbreaking story of the dad, daughter and their harrowing experience has been done to death everywhere else.
I got the impression they were pretty far out. "Prospect" suggests Gold Rush-type ideas, so wild west/fringe civilization stuff. Plus, they talk about how they might miss their chance to get on the ship and get away, and the clear implication is that other ships don't come by (often, anyways). So, they're in deep space.
The atmosphere is dangerous.
The gems are precious and rare.
It doesn't feel like lazy writing to me.
Okay, I grant you that more detail can enrich a world or endear us to characters more, so it's not necessarily bad to go deeper into the world, or to spend longer with the characters, but this film is well put-together. Perfect? No, but that writing is actually quite clever, to me, insofar as it gives us a lot of information without spelling it out.
Sci-fi is often trappings. Wrath of Khan is a story of revenge that ends in a naval battle. The Genesis Project is largely a MacGuffin, at least until Star Trek III. The whole Star Wars saga are samurai movies and World War II dogfight films. They're about family, journeys, quest, and so on, but not "sci-fi". Minority Report is a film noir murder mystery with psychics (not exclusively the domain of sci-fi).
Besides all that, "space western" is practically its own genre at this point, with the high number of entries into that realm, and this definitely falls under that.