profitably going where, well..

[twoeleven]

i recently watched prospect, a low-budget (a few million dollars) feature-length sf movie, adapted from the online short film of the same name. i recommend seeing it – hey, the short is free! – even though i have mixed feelings about it.

prospect is a coming of age story. those are always hit or miss for me. i came of age a long time ago, and managed it without what's apparently the (these-days?) usual anxieties and problems. i like how to train your dragon: a boy and his dog grow up, but that may be due to the sophistication of the "adult" part of the story.

in any case, my specific problem with prospect is it's not clear that girl growing up is actually a child at the beginning. her dad certainly treats her like a child, but it's hard to tell if she is one. in the short, this is forgivable; there's just not a lot of story-telling time, and the focus is on becoming an adult, not being a child.

in both versions, the becoming and being an adult parts work. The feature feels padded out in a few places – i fast-forwarded through a couple of scenes of showing off the very nice olympic peninsula with SFX alien scenery. it was well done, and makes an excellent example of why “earth-like” worlds may not be very habitable, but it could have been trimmed. 'cept that would have made the "feature-length" version a bit short for that title. alas, there seems to be no market for novelette-to-novella-length movies, between twenty and sixty minutes long.

and i like the acting and writing; the characters are memorable and well portrayed. i especially liked... let's call him the third character... in the feature.

the short has a plot hole, but eh, i can forgive that. it's a short, and there are perfectly good in-setting explanations that would work. it would have been an icebox moment except that i'd seen the feature first, which I think made it stand out. so, you may not even notice it.

and I really like the portrayal of the technology.

the tech – all the things shown in the short, and the spaceship in the feature – are sometimes described as “retro”. i'm gonna call them robust. i really liked the hand-powered gear: the air and water pumps, and a hand-cranked battery charger. there's lots of manual labor shown, where we'd throw electric or internal-combustion power at the problem. that's really what you'd want for a very small operation on the frontier. obviously, if you need heavy equipment, like the spaceship, you bring it, but for something like this, KISS. in the feature, the characters are showing tearing down and patching their own gear. much easier if it's simple and you can hand-make close-enough spare parts.

and they use paper maps in the field. bliss! even though i have GPS in my phone, i carry a topo map and compass when hiking. those rarely need to be rebooted, and i've never seen one that needed to be recharged. (er, yes, i can navigate by map and compass. i was a boy sprout.)

that's why i really like the spaceship. it's all "a switch for every control and a light or analog meter for every indication" machine. perfect. fancy glass panel multi-function displays are single points of failure: if it busts, you ain't going nowhere. multiple glass panels with multiplexing is better, as one can substitute for another, but god forbid you need to look a lot of information at once, like, oh, in an emergency.

the ship did have some fancy gadgets, like an electronic telescope perhaps with an image intensifier, but they're few and far between. everything else looked like it could be repaired or replaced with just the schematics and hand tools; the ship made the millennium falcon look like a slick new tech toy.

so, I can recommend the movie if you like rock-hard SF tech depictions.


the feature is available streaming; i don't think it ever was in theaters.

Comments

[corvi]

I enjoyed the short, aside from periodically being distracted by too-familiar plants. Thanks for the link.