Strange Biology

Rating: 6/10 (22 June 2012)

I was disappointed in the movie Prometheus, which may have been better as a philosophical story about aliens beings creating humanity without involving the Alien franchise. (Not as much of a money maker, perhaps.) Two movies were there; combining them did not given depth or clarity to the plot. Emendations to improve the script follow:
1) In the movie, large, luminously white humanoid beings created humans on earth with their own DNA. Anyone who's gotten a B in a high school biology class should know that i) we are 98% related to chimpanzees, and our evolution on earth is understood fairly well, and ii) if we belong to the same species as the luminous humanoid aliens, why do we look so different? So, THESE ALIENS COULD NOT HAVE MADE HOMO SAPIENS WITH THEIR OWN DNA. If we want an origins story, either these aliens should have began all life on earth (not believable even within this imaginary universe, since multicellular life began 1 billion years ago) or they just contributed/tweaked the genes that make human beings unique from the other great apes, such as those genes contributing to speech, brain size, etc. Can't the script writers consult with biologists to get their plot to make sense? Also, why can't these aliens just be the cool trunked reptile creatures that they appear at first to be, rather than revealing that their skin is external armor? The entertainment industry is way too anthropocentric.
2) Why did the humanoid aliens have to be the originators of the Aliens, and worse yet, accidental originators? The nasty H.R. Geiger Aliens could have evolved on a hostile planet and contacted a visiting party of the space-faring (reptile-trunked) humanoid aliens. Ridley Scott et al. were too intent on writing a twisted origins story involving human beings for their Aliens. IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY BLOODY SENSE FOR ALIENS TO COME INTO BEING SPONTANEOUSLY.
3) "Prometheus" is a Greco-Roman myth about a titan who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind, and his punishment lasted forever after. WHERE IS THIS PROMETHEUS IN THE PLOT??? Wait for the sequel, maybe? (The first alien humanoid shown, appearing to kill himself by consuming a biological weapon, may have been something like that tragic figure, but no information to that effect was given.)
4) What is the logic behind the android David's behavior? Presumably, he was programmed to be loyal and supportive to the company president who funded the mission, but he didn't really act to protect the president from the reawakened humanoid alien. For no particular reason, he infected the one scientist, and he helped Noomi Rapace to survive. The androids in both the Alien and Aliens movies behaved consistently, in the former to support the economic interests of the mining company and in the latter to aid the escape of humans from the colony. Android David should not have acted like an amalgam of the two.
Actually, not that much needs to be changed to make a better non-Alien movie. Large white humanoid aliens tweak early hominid DNA to make us the way we are, hang out with the incipient Homo sapiens who make cave paintings, and then decide that they should eliminate humans with a non-Alien biocide weapon. Tada, all good. Heck, they even could have adopted the already existing Aliens as a military weapon, which they could have been readying to deploy to earth.
I regret that the Aliens don't have a very different origin story. In my version, there are no humans at the beginning but strange races of alien space-travelers that pick up and accidentally disperse the pernicious Aliens from their brutal home planet. We could have some crazy fantastic sequences of planet-bound civilizations and space ships battling Alien infestations. That is what the people want.