If it ain't got Sigourney, it ain't got class or credible science

Rating: 4/10 (21 September 2012)

I was very excited about watching this film, so I planned my evening carefully, called a few friends over and settled down to, hopefully, watch something intelligent. Boy, was I disappointed.
First of all, there's the entire premise, which doesn't work. As another reviewer stated, there is simply no way that constellations seen 35000 years ago could remain the same in the 21st century, quite apart from the fact that the constellation painted on the cave wall could have been anything at all.
Secondly, how did they travel so many light years in just 2 and a bit Earth years? Puhleeeeeeeeez, people - we're long past the Star Trek mentality which manages to use velocities well in excess of the speed of light. Hollywood directors would be well advised to watch Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole in order to acquaint themselves with actual science in these films.
And as far as the DNA comparisons that were done between alien and human DNA were concerned, it's impossible to have two strains of absolutely identical DNA: they must come from the same individual. But to add insult to intellectual injury, they then stated that the "alien" DNA was much older than the human DNA. Duh, whaaaat? Either they're the same, or they're not. Only with differences noted and genetic markers studied can the age of a given strand of DNA in comparison to another be determined. At least as far as I know.
As far as the cast is concerned, I had enormous problems with Charlize Theron. Quite a while before one of the characters asked the same question in the film, I found myself wondering whether the wretchedly wooden woman was actually supposed to be a robot. Michael Fassbender, who actually WAS playing a robot, did a wonderfully camp version of a Peter O'Toole/Lawrence of Arabia-inspired android, and it was really one of the highlights of the film.
As for Noomi Rapace - who is this woman? - who played Elizabeth Shaw, well, all I can say is that by the second half of the film I was hoping and praying that she'd be eaten, crushed, blown up, asphyxiated or otherwise destroyed, because she was probably one of the most aggravatingly annoying and boring lead actresses I've ever seen. By the very end of the film I was actually sitting on the edge of my seat, saying "Please, please, please let the spacecraft crush that woman!"
For quite a lot of the film I found myself hoping that Sigourney Weaver would turn up and put things right. Unfortunately, all that turned up was something that the lovely Sigourney would definitely have recognised - and destroyed.
The ending, of course, has been set up for a sequel. This seems to be de rigueur now in Hollywood: it's no longer enough to make a bad film (think Resident Evil 3 and 4), you have to make it in such a way that you leave the bored public both wondering what is supposed to happen next AND wondering why it had already wasted its money on watching the dreadful film in the first place. I'm betting that it will also involve Peter Weyland growing young again, otherwise why would they have cast the handsome and sexy Guy Pearce to play an old man, especially since they used such cheesy effects to make him elderly?
The spfx for the aliens and the spaceship were nice, admittedly, although the grand piano on the spacecraft seemed a little out of place, considering that the crew had been held in stasis during the journey.
Most of the characters were one-dimensional, food-for-monsters generic. The two main female characters were barely two-dimensional, Guy Pearce was wasted in his role, and Michael Fassbender was the only one who really caught my attention.
If it's raining outside and the only other alternative is to gently slit your wrists in a warm bath, then I would recommend this film. Otherwise - definitely not.