skip to the last 20 seconds before the credits and you've learned the only thing that matters in this film

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2012)

I will mention when a spoiler is about to appear. Otherwise i will be loosely talking about moments within the film.
The start i very much enjoyed, it set the scene beautifully, there was that feeling the original alien films gave you, like the calm before the alien infested storm. You just kept waiting till they over turned that stone....then....the film kept going.....kept going.....then you realized that moment you crave in an aliens film will never come...Why? Because this is a prequel...
...and because this film took no time to let you know what was actually going on.
The "very very ending" is interesting. But to me thats all it was...interesting, not OMG THATS SO EXCITING!!! More like, hmmm, they put that in like it was supposed to make me jump in excitement and then run of to my pc and print fanboy scripts about that precise moments awesomeness. But no. The moment is essentially what the whole film is about...the problem : they left the whole film so vague and lacking in information that they could have had anything happen, absolutely anything, and it would have fitted in. The ending could have come about from at least 5 or 6 different reasons...there's just that many things they "create" in this film but don't follow on or expand upon that I wouldn't have been surprised if Ripley jumped out of a cryo tube at some point. "You just gotta believe!" echoes in my mind.
This to me is not good storytelling or directing, sure i want my scary films to be vague at first and to leave some work up to me . This adds to the fear factor, but this film never pinpoints what the actual threat is. You just keep floating from one threat to another, never really getting any face time with that specific threat to understand them or care that they existed in the first place. To top it of the only entertaining deaths in my mind were the first 2, the rest were essentially deaths from fighting rather than surprise.
By the end i felt like id watched the set up to several different movie starts with no satisfying conclusion on any, most things just got left where they were, no information being added. That would be after the 1 dramatic scene it will have had in the film before it moved on.
Here's the bit where i am gonna give away one thing, but its because I want to flame about this that i bring it up.
WIthin about 10 minutes, every person dies "pretty much", except for the hero. From the trailers you will already know there's a ship crash and explosion, that takes out 50% of the people left at this point (incredibly NOT exciting scene because it is just so sudden and rushed). The rest die in horrifically unenlightening ways like being crushed or hit over the head really hard. Now your probably thinking why is this a problem? Well its a problem because I just watched 1-2 hours of character building just to watch everyone die. THERE WAS NO RELEVANCE TO ANY OF THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE!!!!! There was no hidden message. There was no clarification on how the threats in the film really BECAME a threat. To top it off the hero flies of into the sunset in a ship that was made to crash just minutes ago, with a pointless speech about finding the truth. WHERES MY TRUTH!!!???
I literally just watched a 2 hour film for the last 20 seconds and some CGI. Thats why some people are so upset. Because they expected so much more from something like a prequel to alien. I was one of them...
SPOILER ALERT also, the black eyed alien was doing everything in its power to get out of there with his ship, he crashed it because prometheus crashed into him, so if his ship was in a good enough condition to fly : why did he get off the ship when the only threat had just blown itself up? He could easily have just flown away anyway and done what he intended. Its this kind of unexplained change in behaviour that aggravates me in films because it undermines everything i just watched.
It is simply unrealistic within the world they created and if i don't believe this sci-fi world is real then whats the point in getting emotionally invested in the film when they could just undo anything they've laid down as fact when it suits them. For example, how would you feel if one time somebody got attacked by an alien but it didn't bleed acid - simply because that character had to live to make the film work. you'd be angry. The same can be said for this moment i am talking about and a few others like it.
There's even all this talk about alien races creating and trying to kill humanity, but we got no answers to any of that, we just get to find out thats what they wanted to do. It's a pointless drop because nobody cares IF the answers not going to be coming in this movie. Its not like I'm looking to Prometheus to answer some unending question about god thats stuck in my mind.
but just have a look at some of the other reviews, the amount of plot holes is endless.