Budapest, Turkey - on a new moon.

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2012)

Weird intro a violent demise intriguing so far so good (although we never find out this scene's relevance) an obviously nepotistic couple holding hands, like some wide-eyed teens, inspecting some gobbledygook alien-contact cave-drawings not good but acceptable; this is sci-fi after all i.e. BS is allowed not quite sure how they found this star-system based on these vague little kiddie-scribbles; it's hardly a map to uncle Bob's next-door garage let alone to a distant planet... 4 years later, a squeaky-clean ship (not adhering to Lucas's "used universe" approach) is sent to look for our "makers" Darwin's out the window, defeated by the superior intellect of a Hollywood writer the producers/writers/liars of "Ancient Aliens" would whole-heartedly support this, but this IS a sci-fi flick, so I won't complain A cheesy android who looks like a young SS officer manages the ship fine why not But who's in charge?... Oh no Ohhhhh noooo
Not Charlize! The same woman who thinks that Budapest is in Turkey, the same blond bimbo who mugged her way through "Monster", and that poses with Mandela just so she could lend herself "seriousness" i.e. escape her ex-starlet bimbo image - is in charge of a one-trillion-dollar space-exploration expedition. Ridley, have you lost your mind? I'd rather see Captain Pickard's testicles run this ship – and he's a bloody bald pacifist.
OK, fine so Ms. Theron, who looks like a High School dropout, is the boss sort of; there seem to be 5 different crew-members calling the shots here: "The couple is in charge, but so is my daughter, and the Captain, AND me the aging loopy bastard later on" Who's the captain?... The black guy, who looks like he arrived straight from football practice... Oh, brother, this is starting to approach Avatar/Sunshine/Armaggedon-like levels with leaps and bounds But is the rest of the crew similarly balmy? Yuuuup The annoying/unappealing couple who found the cave-drawings was actually invited, no clue why(superstition? duh) The others aren't any better; some of the crew look/behave/talk like a bunch of young MTV slackers from "16 & Pregnant"... Ridley might as well have cast the "Jackass" bunch as these "astronauts" I see neither scientists nor astronauts here; I do see however a bunch of (mostly lame) actors lost within the confines of a shitty/confused script directed by a once-worthy director The silliest one is Red-Beard who "came just to make money" Oh no, that reeks of crap; I bet he'll do and say many dumb things in the course of this flick Predictably, he dies first, leaving him little time to "shine"...
I was right: Red-Beard is yowling like a wolf as they enter the cave Perhaps prolonged cryogenic sleep turns adults into imbeciles?... Minutes pass What's he doing now? He is suddenly terrified because of the dead alien body?... Is he actually shouting, throwing a hissy-fit?... Evidently, Ridley didn't deem it necessary to have either an intelligent/mature-behaved crew nor to have psycho-tests for space-travelers prior to sending them on mega-expensive missions... I guess such evaluations had lost their usefulness by 2091: everyone in this future is calm, rational and smart – as is so plainly obvious from the moronic/immature behavior of nearly everyone involved in the mission
"The most significant discovery in the history of mankind," lover-boy says. But do the rest of the crew share his very understandable enthusiasm? Hardly; most of these "astronauts" seem positively bored, as if finding ancient aliens is part of their daily routine. I was half-expecting to see them yawn. The Captain even looks bemused half the time, grimacing, as if treating the mission like some sort of in-joke. Absolutely retarded.
Next up, the examination of the alien head Suddenly, that fish-faced nepotistic anthropologist is a medical expert as well Hooray for feminism!... Or not (I was hooraying too early): sheesh, the two women managed to blow the head up into bits after mere minutes So much for girl-power And what's Charlize doing? Anything meaningful? No: she is striking poses, as usual, her uselessness as a character is becoming ever-more apparent She looks more like a sex-kitten/ship-mascot/eye-candy-for-the-viewers than someone in charge of anything What's this? She is acting all tough, threatening the vastly superior android? The tough-chick shtick did not work even when she played a serial-killer - let alone as a cat-walk(ing) astronaut, where this Budapest-fumbling Turkey-challenged blond may as well be a piece of furniture
So let me get this straight: two men are stranded on the surface (stupidly splitting up from the main group), but the Captain would rather shtoop Charlize than look out for their safety on his pyramid-hologram thing? Wow And THIS is the guy who saves us all eventually?!... In the meantime, the boring in-love-couple are also shtooping. It's one big shtoop-o-rama on this trillion-dollar mission. They have nothing better to do on a fascinating new world where they'd just discovered aliens; Noomi is getting all teary-eyed when the subject of having kids comes up. Ridley, you ought to have your director's license revoked
Red-Beard and his sidekick see a cobra-like creature not cute in the slightest; menacing more than anything But they wanna PLAY with it And then predictably die in true slapstick fashion. Was Ridley shooting a sci-fi/horror comedy?
"I need to visit their planet, find out why they'd changed their minds, decided to destroy us," says the amphibian-faced actress picked here just because her parents are successful show-biz people, in her obviously phony English accent. The answer is as obvious as Danny de Vito's bald head: mankind had turned "Avatar" into the biggest commercial success ever, so obviously our bald-headed makers were disappointed and upset with us. Who wouldn't be?
A ground-breaking film though, in the sense that the first half is moronic, but the second half a lot of fun. Usually it's the other way round.