I Want My Money Back. I Want Those 2+ Hours Back, Too

Rating: 1/10 (25 June 2012)

This movie brings to mind the South Park episode, "The Passion of the Jew" where the kids go to Hollywood to demand their money back from a deranged (portentously) Mel Gibson. This is what I want to do to Ridley Scott.
Even more than demanding my money back, I want to smack him. Then send him to go live with George Lucas who did the same damage to his Star Wars legacy with substandard prequels.
The first two Aliens movies were great. Scary. Fun.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he entered a bunch of information into a writing software program that generated this horrible script.
All of the characters were one-dimensional, except for the robot. ALL of the characters did not act consistently from scene-to-scene. None of them acted like the professions they were supposed to me.
For example, in 1 scene we discover that the punk white trash dude is a geologist, yet he and biologist have no interest in exploring the alien planet, the rock structure, and the alien corpses. Instead of being interested in what they traveled 2+ years to find, they walk away scared of the dead alien. Then, the geologist who is in charge of mapping gets them lost and for some reason they never contacted anyone to tell them and get help - until it was too late. Then, they find an unidentified substance where there was none previously and decide to touch it and find a LIVING alien snake to be "beautiful." Seriously.
Then the Christian(?) archaeologist is suddenly a genetic scientist who can identify foreign matter on the alien corpse head on sight. And her archaeologist partner and boyfriend is getting drunk for no reason. Meanwhile, she and the other woman, presumably a scientist but it was never explained, is really bad at her job, too, and do inexplicably dangerous and stupid things with their retrieved alien head.
Who the aliens were, what the biological weapon was, why their ship didn't take off, why the other aliens were killed but the biological substance's effect was dormant for thousands of years, why the alien at the beginning willingly drank the biological substance, what the biological substance was, why the substance was created, why they didn't kill the humans on Earth in the first place or give them technology, what the cave paintings really meant, and any other substantive question you can think of with respect to this mythology is never answered.
Neither is it answered why and how they convinced this fake elderly benefactor that he could be saved by going to this planet. Nor is it answered what the deal is with his daughter and why she bothered to come if she wanted to take over the company - with him traveling to another planet and on the verge of death seems like a good time for her to stay home and control the company. And why he lied about being dead and "snuck" on board is never explained.
Nor is it explained why the robot fed the boyfriend the alien substance. Nor is it explained how the woman who apparently could not get pregnant ends up pregnant from the alien infect sperm her boyfriend now apparently carries.
That's just a taste of the stupidity that runs rampant in this movie.
On top of that, there are interesting relationship tidbits and character background hinted at, but never explored. Nothing of any substance is developed in this movie - not space travel, not the mythology, not the characters, not the plot.
The dialogue is almost without exception annoying and pointless. Which sums up this movie. Annoying and pointless. I want my money back.