Some things are better left unsaid

Rating: 6/10 (9 March 2018)

So, Prometheus ends. Not a bad film... not a great film, but not a bad film. But the one thing it does do is leave us with a sense of anticipation. We're going to meet the Engineers! And Shaw and David are going to do something really exciting and possibly quite interesting, and we'll see their relationship evolve and explore some interesting ideas about human-as-creator and how creations can be flawed!
Oh, wait, no we're not. Because Shaw is already dead by the time the film starts, David has been transformed into a two-dimensional Ubermensch narcissist with delusions of grandeur, and the Engineers have all been wiped out. A film's worth of set-up is dismantled in the space between two scripts. And what we're left with is a hackneyed story of something-or-other I can't even be bothered to delve into.
There are plot-holes (the Engineer's just let this mystery ship fly over their only remaining city unchallenged?), dodgy CGI (the original Alien looked more real than the CGI one here) and stupid crew-members (why, oh why, did they not suspect David was tricking them?) and a twist ending that isn't a surprise to anyone other than the characters of the film. It isn't really that scary, and it isn't that exciting. David is nowhere near complex enough to justify the focus that's placed upon him. And, yet again, we see an Alien being blown out of an airlock (third time's the charm!).
But what disappointed me the most is that Scott has undermined the key element of the original film. When Alien first hit cinema screens, it really was unlike anything we'd seen before. Geiger's creature was so different from the man-in-a-suit monsters that proceeded it, it really was alien. It was something so different, so strange, horrific and unusual, that the audience had no frame of reference. Now Scott has shown us that the Alien isn't actually that alien at all. It's just a bioweapon that was created by another species of humanoid and perfected by one of our own androids. Mystery explained.
2017 was a bad year for franchise movies. Star Wars, DC and Marvel Universes, and the Alien franchise are all starting to feel very tired. We know too much about them all, so there are no surprises and no discoveries. They rehash old ideas, but can't match the original vigour, or they try to make the old ideas into something new and betray the original spirit. There are occasional one-offs that are worth watching, but they're the ones that break from the main franchise and may as well not be part of the franchises at all. And now there's talk of Blade Runner being brought into the Alien cinematic Universe...
I guess there's still so much money in the franchise model that we'll see many more, however, I doubt very much that any of the franchise movies made in the last few years (and next few years) will occupy the same place in cinema history as the original Alien does. There are 18 sci-fi, superhero and fantasy movies in the IMDB top 100, many of which were early films in ongoing franchises. 5 of those 18 were made in the last 15 years, but none of those 5 are part of those original (now resurrected) franchises, and none of those 5 are part of the new, ongoing franchises. It really is a case of quantity over quality for sci-fi.