The Curse of Prequels

Rating: 6/10 (24 June 2012)

is that knowing how we got to the point where we came in is never as interesting as we thought it would be.
Darth Vader and Hannibal Lector were made less interesting by their back stories, not more.
So we have these archaeologists who convince the Evil Company to fund their Trillion Dollar expedition to find this planet where the "engineers" lived. The Engineers are 9-foot tall humanoid giants who created mankind, apparently. But it wasn't their homeworld, it was just their bio-testing lab, and the Engineers decided humanity was some kind of mistake that they needed to eradicate. Since this happened 2000 years ago, it was not because they had seen an episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians." So what you have here is an Alien Movie without the aliens. Not to mention a bunch of characters who do things that make not a lick of sense just to keep the action scenes going. (The Red Letter Media guys cover most of these pretty well.) Visually, it's a treat. Plot terms, it just takes the logical flaws from the Alien Movies and compounds them. (Seriously, you think at some point, Weyland-Yutani would lose their shirts...) The only nice thing is that it eliminates the Alien v. Predator movies from Canon, so there's that.