3 Big Goofs

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2012)

Give this one 4 of 10 stars for the very truly beautiful visuals, including opening sequences and imaginings of the interiors... stuff you all saw in the trailers. Plus one more star for casting of female leads.
Big Goof 1:
Dr Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) wakes up from a deep-space sleep wearing two ace-bandages functioning as a bikini (covering the usual bits). The Ace bandages are fastened by metal-and-plastic clips that are somewhat more fancy that what we use today, but still the same function and clearly part metal.
We soon see her wearing a button-up night-shirt as she prepares to have sex with her partner. It's significant in that she has had a change of clothes since waking up from deep sleep. Probably a shower too.
Later entering a medical scanner, she's wearing an identical ace-bandage bikini again. No explanation on why this is the right thing to wear instead of say a t-shirt or hospital gown or scrubs. She is asked to remove a metal crucifix, but not the metal clips holding her ace-bandage "bikini" together.
The ace-bandage bikini is a very important outfit to the movie. Rapace/Shaw is still wearing it in a reprise of Sigorney Weaver's panic-in-just-a-thin-t-shirt moment. This outfit make no sense in terms of fashion or function or thrill or continuity. Hetro guys (including me) would prefer a t-shirt or something even more revealing. Rapace has shown us her considerable charms (Girl with a Dragon Tattoo) so why not at least a sweaty t-shirt?
Big Goof 2:
The "big-bad-nasty" wants to plant her embryo in you, so baby can eat you from the inside, till ready to hatch. Your next role is "walking eggshell," a task you do not survive. VERY Scary, especially as filmed in Alien.
The big-bad-nasty will also eat you at the cellular level, then use the bowl of mush you quickly become to quickly build copies of itself. This could have been VERY frightening, if the cinematography showed the process correctly. Such attacks at the cellular level are common in our world. It's what happens with Ebola, HIV and Herpes: Virii invade your cells where they insert some "malicious" code into your regular DNA. Your cells then stop working to keep you happy and start working for the virus. Mostly this is very much against your best interests. Copies of the virus are made till the cell walls explode, releasing copies of the virus into the host (you) where they infect more of your cells. Lather, Rinse Repeat.
Prometheus could have presented a CGI of this process which would stand alone, educating and enlightening along with frightening all at the same time. Instead the CGI shows a victim's DNA being dissolved, then random atoms are re-assembled into a new string with a nasty new mission. As shown, this would require something more powerful than the strong nuclear force or the weak nuclear force; so suspension of disbelief is halted for a lot of us.
This is doubly sad, because the idea of latent malicious code in your "junk" DNA waiting to do something nasty when triggered is a very interesting idea. It's been developed in books (The Deus Machine) and is worthy of movie development. Imagine throwing just one ACTG "switch" that exists in every cell in every body which then launches a malicious program that causes normal DNA to "go postal." Sigh.
Big Goof 3:
Alien spacecraft - at least 100 meters across in the shape of a big "C" fails to complete launch and after colliding with another spacecraft crashes from at least 5,000 meters onto the surface of the 1-G alien planet. It flies flat like a Frisbee, but lands on it's thin side, 90-degrees from flight attitude. Rather than break into millions of pieces (or even two); it holds shape and further survives falling flat onto the tarmac.
Nothing on the periodic table of elements is that strong at that scale.
There's more, but time to stop. It would be so wonderful if just one person on a blockbuster movie's production team was actually capable of reading SciAm or ANY technical publication.