A beautiful mess

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2013)

Well, I'm disappointed. The movie started very nicely but began to fall apart after they landed on the planet. Yes, the movie is beautifully shot and it had some of the best 3D work I've ever watched in a theater. This is to be expected from Ridley Scott.
But the script is just bad. Well, Damon Lindelof of Lost wrote it so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. The film raises many questions but provides very few answers. The actions of the scientists were also so baffling, reckless and irrational that I just couldn't help but shake my head for most of the movie. These guys are supposed to be smart scientists but then the mapping orb geologist gets conveniently lost, the biologist tries to pet a clearly hostile alien organism, everyone just disregards quarantine procedures and so on. Did these guys get their degrees from some online university? I don't know, maybe this is just a very crude way by Scott to imply that all humans are no better than monkeys intellectually. Particularly silly was the surgery scene where a female scientist has abdominal surgery and then just proceeds to run around for the rest of the movie. I know people do impossible things in movies but that was just preposterous. It would be impossible to walk let alone run after an operation like that.
Character actions were only taken to advance to the next plot point and not to flesh out the characters. This made it so much harder to achieve the 'suspension of disbelief' that is required in these kinds of movies. In Alien the crew's actions were understandable because they were just regular towing ship pilots and mechanics, not scientists of such caliber that they're being invited to a trillion dollar space expedition. These issues make it almost impossible to feel any sympathy towards any of the crew members and therefore it diminishes the tension in the film. When everyone's acting like an irrational idiot, you don't care if they die or not.
The movie was also 30 minutes too short because the characters basically never stop to discuss anything and they don't react to what happens to the other crew members. For example, no one seems to react to the female scientist running around the ship after the surgery. You'd think someone would notice the massive staples on her stomach and make a comment about it. Similar thing happened for Scott with Kingdom of Heaven but I'm not sure if this mess can even be fixed with a director's cut because of the idiotic behavior of the scientists.