Not 'Alien'-worthy

Rating: 5/10 (9 March 2015)

Okay, so I liked this movie, but to call it an 'Alien' prequel...
Let me start of by saying that there's a big lack of strong characters. Hardly any of the characters seemed very likable to me (unlike, say, Ripley, who I instantly liked and thought of as a very strong character), the only character that I remotely liked was Mr Android, but even then, I feel quite ambiguous about him. Thereby, I also strongly disliked Vickers. I'm not very big on Charlize Theron anyway, but Vickers was just a poor, undeveloped character. Which brings me to the next topic: character development. Because I feel like there's not much of that either.
All of the characters remain mostly constant in what they're like. I've learned that a basic story goes like "Character is in an initial situation; conflict X happens; character adapts to solve X (in other words, character development happens); X is solved and character remains changed in a way." Well, that wasn't really what happened. The main character didn't really change at all. At the beginning she was pretty much "Must seek for engineers - because they made us!" and at the end she was just "Must still seek for engineers - because they made us and now they want to destroy us!" That didn't really seem like much character development at all. As for the other characters... They all just remained the same as at the start and then they all died (which I felt was very unnecessary for this movie, too, but that aside).
I felt the ending was a bit too much 'desperate last measures'. Everything, to me, seemed kind of rushed, I guess. And it was all too much of "Oh no, we don't have a heroic ending that results in the main character seeming as a strong character! Better kill everyone and give a semi-emotional speech, problem solved!" (The speech didn't really add anything, in my opinion, and seemed to be mostly just there to give it an ending slightly similar to the first 'Alien' movie.)
The whole idea that Shaw wants to go back to the Engineers' home planet doesn't make sense either. I get that she wants answers and that she's lost her love and the initial mission wasn't a success, but what could she possibly achieve by going to there? If they would really want to kill the humans, they'll likely just kill her anyway. And even if she did get answers, what would she do with that? Go back to earth where she has nothing and let everyone know "Oh, these aliens want to kill us because of X reason, but yeah, they let me just go back to my home so I could inform y'all!" I felt it was really just "This mission ended up badly and now I feel terrible, let's just go on a suicide mission!"
My last point is that this movie didn't feel 'Alien' at all. I get that it's a spin-off, but still. There's nothing that felt very 'Alien' to me, aside from that one part at the end where the Xenomorph is born. I felt like they just crammed that in quickly to make it a bit 'Alien'. The Xenomorph birth was completely pointless and literally didn't add anything to the movie at all. Of course, this movie is supposed to maybe explain how and why the Xenomorphs were created and all that, but in my opinion it added nothing to the story (and if they really wanted to do a movie to explain the Xenomorphs, they could've come up with a much better idea for it, rather than just "We're going to find the creators of humanity, BUT OH NO THEY'RE EVIL - oh and here's you're alien bye".
In short: In my opinion, this movie is fundamentally flawed and not worthy of the 'Alien' franchise name. It's at best as good as your average modern Sci-Fi movie. The movie had a lot of potential as a standalone (unrelated to the franchise), but they tried too hard to just be able to throw the name 'Alien' on it, and I can't possibly see this as an actual canon to the Alienverse.
Would rate 6/10 because it is an interesting and entertaining movie to watch nonetheless, but I'm downing it to 5/10 because of how it butchered the franchise name.