Should have quit this gig in 1986

Rating: 3/10 (19 August 2014)

***Spoilers and allusions to spoily things***
Know how Ripley's mutated clones were basically begging for death in the ridiculous Alien 3 or 4 or whatever? Yeah, that needs to happen with this franchise. Make it stop.
Plot holes have been covered. Silly characters too. Have we covered the complete lack of imagination?
We're all out of ideas for this picture. I know, let's recycle all the old themes. Woman what looks good in underwear should run around and battle aliens and The Man. Android with superpowers should sabotage (or further, you decide) the mission. Gung-ho mercs say alpha stuff, at least until they turn into pussies. Wise old black man keeps it real. Whatever. A few parallels: swell. A rehash of everything in all of the other installments: no.
Some movies allude to things or have subtle symbols to point to deeper themes. Not here. The android can't _remind_ you of a dashing swashbuckling fop from Lawrence of Arabia, he has to _watch_ the movie, style his hair like Peter O'Toole, and reference his love of David Lean later on. That's not homage, that's dumb flailing around in search of subtance.
Charlize started off interesting, or at least as a mysterious ice queen. Then she becomes a robot bent on singlemindedly pursuing the mission so as to succeed her father. Her father? There's not even any imagination here. What if we were left to wonder if she was just a protégé... or a daughter? No, F that. Make sure to mix in a Gladiator scene. Garbage.
And the great "mystery" of whether the Old Man was alive and aboard Prometheus. Who cares? Did they just make that up as they went along? Oh, and nice job putting strange makeup on Guy Pearce, making him about as effective as Edward-Norton-as-the-Man-in-the-Iron-Mask from Kingdom of Heaven, only slightly less interesting. The tension between Charlize the Ice Queen and The Android was so thick you could cut it with a laser sword. If you cared.
Idris Elba: another talent wasted. Oh, he's the stoic veteran spacer. They had to strain to make him relevant. And even then, in the scene where he explains the "these engineers built an military installation, and it went very wrong, and that's all there is to it," he has to vomit his lines as if to tell you that everything is too f'ing confusing for you peasants so let me spell it out for you. I wonder if he cringed as he read that dreck.
The story is too ridiculous, the twists too silly, the end too dumb to make up for the sever lack of subtlety in this movie. Ridley Scott may as well have filmed himself breaking light bulbs with a hammer.
And those bulbs: what do they symbolize? Your good taste in pictures, and desire for art, being systematically crushed by Hollywood's Maul of Mediocrity.