In space no one can hear you groan

Rating: 2/10 (6 January 2014)

Having watched Prometheus several times now, hoping that it would get better with repeated viewing, I can say that were it not for the excellent Michael Fassbender, this movie would have no redeeming features of any kind.
It's ironic that the only character in the entire movie that isn't completely one dimensional happens to be an android. Noomi Rapace who plays the only other reasonably fleshed-out character, Doctor Elizabeth Shaw, manages to make her character so whiny and unlikeable that I think the movie would have benefited by her being killed off along with everyone else.
Every single other character is simply a non-entity, with nothing of interest to say (or worse). The script really is awful. The concept, that scientists journey to an alien planet to find the answers to the ultimate questions of mankind's existence (and it all going wrong), is an interesting one. But the finished product is more like a parody of that concept than a serious attempt to realize it. What would happen if a bunch of hopeless morons went to meet their makers, and their makers turned out to be genocidal maniacs who kill on sight? That's Prometheus in a nutshell. It might be fine if it were supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek comedy. But it's not. Not intentionally anyway.
In addition to that, basically, what we have here is a clumsy attempt by Ridley Scott to shoehorn a backstory into the appearance of the "spacejockey" creature which was shown in the first "Alien" film and possibly an explanation of the genesis of the xenomorph creature itself. And it simply doesn't work. This is to "Alien" what "The Phantom Menace" was to "Star Wars"... it completely undermines the mythology and contradicts itself.
The admittedly beautiful visuals are not enough to save this movie from the contrived plot, awful acting, disposable characters, and just plain silliness. In fact, it's only Michael Fassbender who single-handedly saves Prometheus from being completely unwatchable garbage. His character, David, is so apart from the other characters in the movie and the only one you have any sympathy for. Was this some genius masterstroke by Ridley Scott? Some kind of sub-text? Considering the clumsiness of everything else in the movie, I seriously doubt that this was the original intention. I think that it is simply Fassbender himself managing to pull something meaningful out of this awful mess of a movie. Any kind of perceived depth in the plot is just wishful thinking on the part of the viewer. After a few viewings, you'll notice the continuity errors that prove it once and for all. The people making this movie either had no idea what they were doing or didn't care.
This is a movie that does not know what it is trying to be, and it ends up being nothing except something to ridicule. The big questions it leaves you with are not "where did we come from?" but "how much did people get paid to make this?" and "why didn't people notice how bad the script was?"