Written by Mary Shelley

Rating: 4/10 (4 June 2012)

Spoilers thar be, Maytees.
Is a man created by man still a creature of God or is it a monster? Do we have the right to create meta-human life? What if we are the children of unknown fathers? For answers please consult Frankenstein. For self-important, barely comprehensible drivel please consult Prometheus.
Great direction can save poor scripts. A director seduced by CGI shooting an incredibly weak screenplay by an overrated pair of writers will not. How on Earth Lindelof and Spaihts got the gig is beyond me. There are strong writers in Hollywood and others trying to get a break that could have done a better job, a MUCH better job.
Ridley Scott, like Spielberg, has forgotten what making a raw, honest movie is like and is far too distracted with how excessive CGI can make it look pretty. Alien was a dark, cold, spartan film set in a bleak, merciless universe. The budget and effects limitations at the time meant that Scott had to use his imagination to create dread. Here he has all the money and effects he can ask for and the resulting film is the polar opposite. Less is more. A filmmaker like Scott should know that. All 4 Alien movies were filmed on a soundstage (save for one 'beach' shot in Alien 3). They were confined and claustrophobic. Prometheus is set in massive, wide-open spaces, which I assume is supposed to make us feel desolate and isolated. But when it cuts back and forth between interior and exterior so much the opposites negate each other, meaning we feel neither confined nor abandoned.
The story is set a number of years before Alien in which a bunch of expendable characters (including a lot of nobodies) travel to a distant planet (a 4-year round trip) to find the beings that created life on Earth. When they get there they discover...a load of confusing, muddled nonsense that is far from frightening and is only just barely above mildly interesting.
Alien was populated with 7 single or double-syllabled characters that felt real and authentic thanks to their quiet interactions and dialogue. We learned their names and positions quickly. Prometheus has more characters than I can count (some appear out of nowhere and quickly disappear as fast) with some of them not even being coherently named. Not that coherence is this film's strong point.
Noomi Rapace is cute as Elizabeth Shaw, the lead scientist who believes in 'The Creators' (the Space Jockey creatures), but she's very miscast. Michael Fassbender as android David is the only other character who gets a notable amount of screen time. You'll care about none of them.
Scott once said that the film wasn't a prequel to Alien (after originally announcing that it was) then changed his mind a short while later. If this was supposed to keep us intrigued it didn't work. If anything it only got the confusion going before anyone even saw the movie.
It has some lofty ambitions, and succeeds at neither of them. The opening scene of a Creator sacrificing himself at an indefinite point in history to create mankind by putting his DNA into our water is nonsense. Was disintegrating himself the only way of doing this? Could he not have just bled into the primordial soup? Did he create the dinosaurs too? Was it a scene set just after the last ice age? Did they accidentally create primates in the process? Why did they create us in the first place? How did the early civilizations learn of the Creators? Did they visit? Why did they have a star map that led to a planet that was just a testing field?
The creation of the famous Xenomorph Alien is so convoluted and preposterous. Let's see if you can follow this:
Android David finds a vase of goo in the pyramid/mountain place. He touches it to his finger. He deliberately puts his finger into Holloway's champagne, infecting him as he ingests. Holloway gets sick. Before the symptoms become obvious he mates with his infertile lover Elizabeth. She becomes pregnant and quickly goes into labor. She aborts her 'hell baby' by caesarian section but just leaves it there in the operation room. Some time later the angry Creator is attacked by the full grown hell baby and is consumed by it, to a degree, for unknown reasons. That dead Creator then births a primitive Xenomorph.
Pardon me, but that is a load of garbage. I honestly cannot believe something that ludicrous made its way into, what is essentially, an Alien movie. The original had so much purity and mythos. Did Ridley Scott not even watch his own movie for pointers? Lindelof and Spaihts have really painted themselves into a corner with that dumb ending too. When Shaw gets to the real Creator planet she will be the only human being in the film, if that is the way the speculative sequel will go.
The mystery of the Space Jockey has been completely ruined. It could have been so much better. But Scott needs to be brought back down to Earth (pun intended) and he should have chosen his writing team more wisely. Still, it was nice to hear Jerry Goldsmith's Alien theme, albeit briefly.