Prospect

  Damon (Jay Duplass) and his daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) are 'floaters' - space drifters, basically, trying to make a living in the lawless frontier of the far reaches of civilized space. Damon, a very Duplass goofball played straight (though he does get stoned in one scene), has a lead on a prospect on a distant verdant moon, a toxic planet covered in budget-friendly earth-like forests: the location of a valuable pod of organically-generated gems.

The long-distance starship that ferries them to the moon's vicinity is doing its last run, so they risk being left stranded if they don't rendevouz with it three days later when it slingshots back from a nearby star. So of course things go wrong from the outset: their beat-up lander breaks down on entering the planet's atmosphere.

 That's only the start of their problems. While trekking to their destination they soon run into another couple of scavengers led by one Ezra (Pedro Pascal); The encounter proves disastrous, leaving Cee alone in the moon with a broken-down lander.

 Ezra tracks her down, and Cee enters into an uneasy alliance with him to try and find her father's big score and find a way off-planet.

 It's a slow, methodical movie that occasionally bursts into spurts of ugly, desperate violence - an expansion on a short from 2014, but it does more than enough to earn an extended runtime. The setting is well realized; While it's pretty jarring to see people in spacesuits walking through obviously terrestrial woods, the amount of detail in the world - coupled with some wonderfully functional-looking machinery, spaces and tools (production design: Matt Acosta, costumes by Aidan Vitti) ends up making it feel fairly convincing.

 The script, by the directing team of Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell, also provides a lot of cool character detail. Cee listens to space indie pop and fills her notebook with a reimagining of a beloved novel she's lost, and Ezra is a Mal Reynolds-style motormouth who keeps spouting all sorts of stories and bizarre facts in a very compelling, flowery patois (yes, the Firefly influence is very strong in this one). The roster acting is superb from everyone involved.

 It looks great, too. Co-director Zeek Earl acts as the cinematographer and he gives the movie the look of a faded polaroid; It's a weird choice for a sci-fi film, but it's a colorful, cohesive aesthetic that fits the film's down-to-earth, subdued action very well. There's a little bit of blood - including a pretty gruelling field surgery, and the practical effects used on the meaty alien flora(?) that serves as the story's McGuffin are pretty cool.

 Daniel L.K. Caldwell provides a gorgeous, very memorable soundtrack. Seriously, it's very, very good.

  Not sure what's up with harsh, cruel sci-fi with young women as protagonists -this would pair well with Vesper- but it does give me hope that we could get an adaptation of Alastair Reynold's Revenger one of these days. I wouldn't want to hype this one too much, as it's a bit on the slight side, but I liked it.