Pretty visuals in search of a good story

Rating: 5/10 (19 June 2012)

Prometheus managed to get me very excited: from the trailer I expected an intelligent, gripping, visually splendid science fiction movie like we haven't seen in a long, long time. Well, I got the pretty visuals, but Prometheus is a movie in search of sensible characters and an intelligent plot.
Two archeologists discover a star map on a cave painting and from such scarce evidence infer that Mankind was created by aliens, which they call the Engineers. They convince Weyland Corporation to finance a trillion-dollar expedition to the planet to search for alien life, filled with incompetent geologists and botanists who never heard of basic health procedures. At this point the movie basically becomes a remake of Alien - ships lands on alien planet, scientists find alien complex, strange things creep them out, people get infected with aliens, a double-crossing android (brilliantly played by Michael Fassbender, one of the movie's saving graces) manipulates the crew, people fight aliens, etc.
Most of what you see in this movie was already in Alien, all the way back in 1979, and the new ideas aren't particularly well developed. I'm sure an interesting movie about aliens creating mankind could be made, but Sir Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof aren't up to the task. Most of the movie's problems come from the script: characters do bizarre, irrational things all the time - people with state of the art digital maps get lost in straight tunnels, scared scientists try to pet visibly hostile alien creatures; people with almost no information make incredible assumptions - Janek, the ship's commander, who never leaves the ship, out of the blue claims that the aliens were building biochemical weapons. There's an absurd twist halfway that introduces a new character in a very silly way. Alien, let's be clear, didn't have brilliant characters and the dialogue was so-so, but their personalities were well-defined and they were instantly compelling. Most of the characters here were loathsome and I was hoping they'd all die violently.
As a stand-alone movie Prometheus is a disgrace. But it's even worse what it does to Alien; basically it cheapens it by destroying the wonderful mysteries it kept for decades. I don't think the world ever needed to know who or what the Space Jockey was, we were all better off finding our own solutions in our imagination. But Scott must hate people using their imagination. He and Lindelof must also hate their because they came up with a dull explanation for him, not to mention he changed his bizarre look. The original Space Jockey was gigantic, this one is almost the same of a human. Although they're not the same character, since Prometheus takes place in another movie, I really want to see what explanantion - if any - they're going to find to there being two Space Jockeys of different sizes.
Besides Fassbender's excellent performance, this movie has excellent special effects, sound design and cinematography. The opening shots are beautiful and the visual inside the alien compound are very good, even if they're not up to H.R. Giger's.
I expected more, I was anxious to love this movie.