Beautifully photographed nonsense

Rating: 5/10 (13 September 2012)

Having all the Alien films "burdening" my back (and I still think only the first - which should also be the last as a true masterpiece and a SF par excellence - and partly Mr. Fincher's third were good, involving Dan O'Bannon as a scriptwriter in both cases), I've entered this film expecting Mr. Scott's expertise on the matter, his unique aesthetic approach and a good psychological study of humans in unusual helpless circumstances. Instead of that here we have a mess. No science whatsoever (starship rumbling in open space, hyper-advanced robot, yet C4 method of determining age and so on), no character in characters, parts almost randomly put together creating an illusion of continuity etc. It does not seem like Mr. Scott at all. More like some infantile producers with lots of money and lack of brain. And the story has such a potential. Cast is also excellent but wasted for nothing. We could get so many answers from this movie but instead we got a question - why? Five stars for camera work/photography, Mr. Scott's struggle to get something that makes sense out of this and the cast. Everything else, less than -273 degrees Celsius.