Alien I

Rating: 3/10 (20 October 2012)

The premise of the film is great. In the distant future a space crew is sent on a journey to possibly find the origin (or creators) of mankind. They use a star map discovered in a cave in Scotland by archaeologists. The team finally arrives at their destination four years later; a distant moon called LV233, only to learn that most of the aliens (which they dub as the "Engineers") have long vacated the world or died out, and that something went terribly wrong some time ago. Before they can figure out just what that is that went wrong, things start going bad for the crew as well. This is all great stuff, and watching the storyline unfold is a thrill.
Where Prometheus falls short is it tries to be the prequel to the cult hit film Alien from 1979 but doesn't quite mix with the chemistry of the original or the franchise that it kicked off. What's worst is Prometheus lifts elements directly from the franchise without bothering to change anything. For example, I get that including a mysterious android in the film ties it in with the franchise, but we already seen an android decapitated and impaled in Alien and Aliens, respectively. So doing it again here doesn't add any shock value for the audience. We've seen it before, try something new. Or how about the alien pregnancy, with the baby bursting from the abdomen? Yup, that was done already in Alien and Aliens 3. Well, actually there is a really cool surgical procedure in this film done to remove an alien baby from the main character's abdomen before it can hatch, so I guess they did change it up a little bit, but it's not enough to make anyone who's seen the Alien films care. Also while the premise is great, Ridley Scott's execution of the film is not. There is just too many implausible things going on in this film.
A big issue is the opening scene. It is never really explained further in the film, and therefore, seems meaningless. The ending is also problematic. How can the lone survivor run off in an alien spaceship that she does not know how to operate in search of the "Engineers" home planet without any food? Exactly how far does this character expect to get? It just doesn't make sense. There are a lot of moments like this in this film.