Makes AVP Requiem Look Good

Rating: 1/10 (6 June 2012)

It's not just the anticipation that explains my disappointment in this film. It's the contempt the film-makers have shown their audience in presenting this half-baked, pseudo-philosophical nonsense to the public that makes me angry.
The plot - such as it is - is stolen mainly from an X-Files long-running story-arc, shoehorned together with a bit of Van Daniken stuff from AVP, plus some gore/squish scenes to remind us that this is supposed to be a "horror" film. But remember how tense and mysterious the original "Alien" movie was? In which we couldn't be sure how the alien would behave because - well - it was an alien? Here, the potential mystery that could have been exploited is gone. We get tentacles, we get goop - lots of it - and we get lots of unconnected, pointless scenes of nastiness that contain no tension, no sense of claustrophobia, no horror. It's a "so what" of a horror movie.
Screenwriter David Lindeloff tries to fill the void by reminding us this is a "deep" film. It's about the search for god, don't you know. But as Lindeloff demonstrated in "Lost" he's better at promising to deliver than actually delivering. We get some trite rubbish explaining that god isn't necessarily who we want him to be. Whoop.
Then there are the characters. Cardboard cut-outs compared to the rounded characters created by Dan O'Bannon. Charlize is given nothing to do except be "icy" for no good reason. But undoubtedly the worst is David the android (no spoiler). He compares poorly to Ash and Bishop from the previous movies. Those androids were cool, logical and unemotional (as you'd expect). Here, for some reason, David seems to have been programmed as "snippy and supercilious" - prone to making sly digs at his human colleagues. He seems to resent the emotions which he is not supposed to have (other than "resentment" apparently). They even trot out that old android cliché, the "Pinocchio" reference. It's painful.
On the plus side, a lot of Prometheus is quite pretty. But it just demonstrates that Ridley Scott's movies can only ever be as good as the screenplays that inspire them. The "Alien" franchise needs to stop here.