Great Expectations

Rating: 3/10 (5 October 2012)

Three stars out of ten
I read a review of this movie in a national mag I subscribe to and the mag gave it a good review (three stars out of four). I was looking forward to it since I like sci-fi movies and haven't seen a good one in a long time. Good point: Nice special effects which looked convincing. Met my expectations.
Problems with the movie: 1) Granted it's sci-fi, still the movie implies, in direct contradiction to modern biology, that human beings, aka Homo sapiens, had a special extraterrestrial origin. Even a biologist in the movie scoffs at this idea, but he's finished off early in the movie along with an anti-social geologist. I didn't see the need to take this position except to appeal to religious types who do believe this (hey, they think Earth was created about 6,000 years ago too).
2) Then there's the thinly veiled philosophical issue: Where did we (aka H. sapiens) really come from if we somehow sprang up from somewhere else? At the movie's beginning two archaeologists (Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) discover remarkable cave paintings, carvings on steles, etc. from many ancient civilizations pointing to a particular constellation. The two archaeologists conclude the planet where we, the human race, supposedly originated is to be found in this constellation. After this they're on a quest to discover our origins.
Financed by a private corporation (Theron plays the CEO's daughter) a team of scientists, including the two archaeologists, go off to this mysterious planet. Does the team learn where we really come from? Nope. They find evidence that an earlier group of "men" reached the planet about 2,000 years before. Except for one "man", the entire crew of these predecessors were all killed off in some mysterious way. A sample of the one of the dead "men's" DNA is taken by the team, and an exact match is found of their DNA to our own. Conclusion: these guys were our forebears.
But these guys were arming a spacecraft with WMDs and ready to fly off to Earth to destroy humanity (their descendants). Why? That becomes the BIG question, presumably to be resolved in a sequel. This one guy left who wasn't killed off 2,000 years ago goes berserk and kills a whole bunch of the team, including ripping David's (Michael Fassbender) head off. This doesn't kill David although it's a real inconvenience to be left with only a head but no body. But he's an android after all―think of the android in Alien.
Apparently the guy, our forebear, didn't think highly of what humanity has turned into. Given how buff and tall he was, maybe he thought we'd all turned into a bunch of weak wimps that deserved death. The forebear-guy dies by being crushed by a creature resembling a giant squid (wasn't clear to me where it came from), but not before being implanted with an egg by this creature. However, the offspring that comes ripping out of his body looks like ... again, think of Alien.
Hence no way to ask the forebear-guy: Where the heck did you come from? since he's dead. Taking that all the way back, one could presumably trace our lineage back to "the big guy in the sky", or anywhere else you'd like it to be. The movie ends with one of the archaeologists (Rapace, the Marshall-Green character dies from a mysterious disease) setting to depart on a journey to discover where we ultimately come from. The answer presumably to be resolved in a sequel.
3) Okay so the director was Ridley Scott who created Alien. And this movie was intended to be a prequel. So what? Still the Alien thing was way overdone. Too many people also. Who were they? The crew in Alien was a much more compact number. This movie could have been more outstanding since it did have an auspicious beginning. It desperately cried out for a better script and better character development. It also needed more emphasis on science and a lot less on religion. Science itself is awe-inspiring enough. At least for those who know what it's really all about.
4) Finally the acting. The term "wooden" comes to mind. This is most probably due to the overcooked and vapid script. Someone reviewing this movie said he just couldn't get into the characters. Ditto for me. The only one who did a halfway decent job was Fassbender, but he had more to do in the movie than most of the others. Charlize Theron, whom I normally like, came across as a bloodless robot. Maybe she was the robot and Fassbender wasn't. Whatever. This movie seriously needed a Ripley and Noomi Rapace wasn't the gal.
End result: Big disappointment. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: I've seen good sci-fi, but this wasn't it.