A Ral Shame

Rating: 4/10 (11 June 2012)

This review contains spoilers for the film – so don't read on if this will spoil your viewing of Prometheus.
Firstly – I had to create my IMDb account to write this review – something I wouldn't normally do – it was that bad.
Right from the opening 20/30 minutes of the film it starts to fall apart in terms of the plot. The film had so much hype and potential that I was very disappointed that it didn't even live up to 50% of the hype. As a prequel to Alien the film had the potential to be excellent, and with Ridley Scott's production\direction I though this one was going to be a winner along the lines of Bladerunner, Gladiator, A Good Year, Black Hawk Down and Thelma and Louise to name but a few. How disappointed was I.
There are so many poor errors and attention to detail in the film I could film several pages, but here are just a few : 1) In the year 2093 – the best that they seem to have in terms of weapons ready for an Alien world are pistols, shotguns, and hand flamethrowers – PLEASE – this is the future.
2) One of the characters who is mapping the area of the Alien world they have landed in – amazingly – gets lost, even though he has some form of mapping\GPS software on a wrist device. What.
3) The 'Goodish' aliens who we apparently have been cloned\bread from, appear to be air breathers – yet in the last part of the film the 'Goodish' alien seems to be able to make the distance from his downed spaceship to the survival module ( and estimated distance of ½ mile ) without the need for air ( since he arrived without a respirator ) – lack of plot continuity or what.
4) Why was the 'Goodish' alien in stasis and his spaceship ladened with its killer cargo buried on this alien planet if it was then going to deliver this cargo to Earth to exterminate the human race ???? There appeared to also be multiple spaceships buried with presumably the same cargo – why – surely 1 would be enough.
That said – some of the characters were very good – Michael Fassbender was excellent as was Idris Alba ( from the Luther TV series ), even Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron played good roles – they were let down with a weak scrip ( with poor attention to detail ), lack of build up of the main characters, and zero tension. There was massive scare potential (as the original Alien ) – but this just seemed to have been negated and replaced by CGI and technology that on some aspects was brilliant, and on other was ineffective. The film lacked depth, had no intellectual elements to the story and had very little plot detail that left you guessing. A real shame.