Somebody should have told these filmmakers there was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with this same premise.

Rating: 5/10 (11 June 2012)

Well, that was disappointing. Not that Prometheus is such a bad film, particularly by summer blockbuster standards. It's just that the falloff from the idea "Ridley Scott doing a prequel to Alien" to the finished product is so long and steep that it can't be ignored. I think we can all agree that it's better than the last two Alien movies (the Aliens vs. Predator ones don't count), but it doesn't come close to the first two in the series. As wonderful as it looks and as effective as some of its moments are, I think we can also agree that sometimes even the best directors and most gifted casts can't overcome thoroughly uninspired writing.
The story features far too many characters with far too few defined roles and is stuck in between appealing to the audience intellectually and viscerally. The plot turns on the concept of aliens being the creators of humanity, which may have been daring when somebody first came up with it in sci-fi 40 or 50 years ago, but though it repeatedly poses the question of why they did it, nothing even vaguely resembling an answer is suggested. Then, with that unresolved query hanging in the air, a second question is posed of why would the alien creators of humanity now want to destroy it. Again, without even an allusion to a possible reason ever being offered. The script has aliens with the technology to travel the stars planning to destroy mankind not with death rays or anti-matter bombs, but with a bio-weapon so ludicrously elaborate that it had to have come from the laboratories of Rube Goldberg Industries. The ending is one of the least satisfying examples of sequel begging I've ever seen, made all the worse because I don't think Scott realized that's how it comes off.
Michael Fassbender is quite good as the android David, though his performance apparently blinded everyone involved to the fact that his character's actions don't make any sense and his role in the story abruptly flips from pawn to villain to object of sympathy and back again. I have come to love Noomi Rapace and she's pitch perfect here as the script, again, fails to give her enough of a character to play. She's a scientist who came up with the whole alien creator theory and not only has to share that with another character, she and Fassbender have to take turns playing the moral center of the whole production. Charlize Theron is aboard as an evil corporate executive who never does anything all that evil and is reduced to cannon fodder by the end of the film.
Prometheus is also a poor example of a prequel with Scott and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof going out of their way to leave a huge gap between where this movie ends and where Alien begins, to the point where there's room for another prequel or two. The impression I was left with is that Scott and company either started off with the plan of doing an Alien prequel or doing a sci-fi flick about the origins of Man and somewhere along the way the other notion got thrown into the mix and could never get pulled back out. With Alien and Aliens occupying two distinct genres, horror and action, perhaps the temptation of continuing the cycle with something more purely sci-fi was irresistible.
Now, this movie is visually impressive and certainly never boring. It is intellectually and emotionally hollow. I mean, humanity's alien forefathers turn out to be giant albino bodybuilders who, rather than push a button and utilize some amazing piece of technology, prefer to beat and main their enemies with their bare hands?
I hate to be so negative about Prometheus because it's better made and much more ambitious than your standard summer spectacle, but this is one of those cases where the storytelling might have been better and more enjoyable if it had been less ambitious. I wouldn't shoo anyone away from this motion picture because they might easily get a lot more out of it than I did. I can't recommend something, however, that flounders so badly on what it's trying to do and why it's trying to do it.