A good movie with horror elements but rather shallow characters

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2012)

Prometheus had been pretty well hyped so I had somewhat high expectations when I went to watch the movie. To make the story really short, I didn't leave disappointed.
First the good parts: The setting was a pretty interesting one. I loved the scene and the 3D worked really well - at one point I actually got fooled and tried to move my head a bit to see behind and object in the foreground. I was amazed to see the 3D in a movie work so well - although to tell the truth, I've only seen two movies in 3D so far, MiB 3 and Prometheus and the latter seemed to work a lot better. The alien life forms were pretty creepy and when the bad things started happening the horror elements were there. I'm generally not a big fan of traditional horror movies but sci-fi horror works for me and Prometheus really hit home in that regard. There was a lot of unanswered questions and clues thrown around which I personally liked, I love movies that make me think for quite a while even after the movie has ended. To summarize the good points, the visuals were great, the horror worked, the setting and the story was interesting.
Now to the negatives: the characters were lacking. In a good movie you can familiarize yourself more or less to one of the main characters and feel sympathy. In addition the main characters have a story and they're introduced in some natural way in the order of things. Unfortunately this is where Prometheus failed. The two characters Shaw and Holloway, introduced at the beginning could be regarded as the main ones. Unfortunately there really isn't much in their characters to familiarize with. In addition, for some odd reason after they've found the alien structure and briefly poked around inside it Holloway gets all sad, drunk and unprofessional - a very strange reaction from a scientist in those circumstances. He's supposed to be one of the main characters but there's nothing interesting in him and he acts all weird. Shaw on the other hand gets more attention and action and reminds me of the good old Ripley but I'm still left feeling that her character was a bit shallow. And the rest of the crew? Not much to talk about. The pilot and the co-pilots are mere shadows with no real purpose or character whatsoever. The scientists were strange and acted strangely. The introduction to the crew immediately starts with a conflict among the crew members. It felt pretty strange they didn't even know each other and were acting more like wolves towards each other than fellow scientists. The guys were merely meat to the grinder and when people started dropping I didn't even notice who actually died, and I really couldn't even care. The robot David is pretty much the precursor of first Bishop but his real driving motivation is left unclear. He clearly repeats the same pattern of 'study and bring samples to home for study, no matter the risk'. Then again in the very end his co-operation with Shaw leaves me puzzled. At one point he was coldly sacrificing her and in the end helping and co-operating - felt a little bit odd to me. Strangely enough there wasn't much a joy of discovery among any of the crew members. It was like they'd found a dozen ancient alien ruins before - not going 'wow, amazing' a single time. Finding intelligent life didn't seem to be exciting to them at all which I found very odd.
All in all the movie was good and interesting but it had its flaws. I feel there was bigger a focus on the visuals and the background story of Alien at the expense of proper characters and storytelling. Still the story was an interesting one and left a lot of questions open and space for a sequel, in whatever form it may come. There's a lot of open space between Alien and Prometheus to fill up and I'll look forward to the next movie, which I'm very sure will be made.