I'm sorry...what??

Rating: 5/10 (2 June 2012)

I'd have loved this film when I was fifteen. I would have soaked it up unquestioningly and raved about the visuals and the space craft and the settings and the frights. Because when you're fifteen that's all that's really important.
Now that I'm old and crotchety, I look for a little bit more. Not an awful lot, it has to be said, but a little bit. And that little bit is a coherent plot. Sadly, Prometheus falls well short.
You can't fault the movie for sets and visual effects and score and sound - all of that is just as you'd expect for $200 million. There's nothing wrong with the acting either, although I imagine a lot of people would agree that Michael Fassbender's android David steals every scene he's in. Where this movie ultimately disintegrates is in the unravelling of the plot, quite literally in this case.
It just doesn't make any sense.
The principal narrative drive of the movie is various ancient human civilisations leaving engravings and cave paintings of the same constellation suggesting that our origins are extra-terrestrial. Humanity sends a ship out there to investigate. With me so far? This is plausible enough in the world of sci-fi, right up to the point where we find out that the location of these star-maps (presumably provided by the 'engineers' themselves, as referred to in the movie), is not their home planet or even a welcome sign but is in fact their equivalent of a weapons manufacturing plant that has been set up on a remote planet.
Eh? If you try hard enough, you could argue a case for this: perhaps the most obvious being that if our civilisation ever became advanced enough to follow the star-map and find this place, that we'd do ourselves in in the process. If that's the case, then WHY bother setting up our civilisation in the first place? We then find in the climactic third of the movie that these engineers were just about to set off in a ship BACK to earth to deliver lots of their nasty bio-goo to kill us all off or transform us into genetic weapons or whatever it does (again, left a bit nebulous in the movie), but their plan went pear-shaped and they never got off the ground.
Why they want to kill us now after taking all the time to seed the planet, no one seems to know. Am I missing something really obvious, here? There's lots of other strange things like the squid-creature that Rapace's character has removed from her womb and why a strange penguin-goblin thing is born from one of the engineers at the very end of the movie. If their genetic blue-print is almost identical to ours (again as suggested earlier in the movie), wouldn't a more typical Geiger alien be the product? Who knows...
Ultimately, a movie that looks and sounds great but just leaves the audience (or at least ME) very confused and ultimately wondering what just happened.