Great to look at, great to feel, not great to hear. Or think about.

Rating: 6/10 (10 July 2012)

Plot The movie begins with an unidentified marble-white humanoid on an unidentified planet, speechlessly drinking a very strange looking liquid, and then proceeding to break apart into shards of tissue, all the while only making noises, harking back to the first 20 or so minutes of 2001. After this we go to the year 2093, where archaeologists Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) lead an expedition to a planet where they think they can find some answers about humankind's beginning. Once on the planet however, it would appear that they aren't the only living things there, despite not seeing anything. From here on out it mostly follows the Alien series' style of picking characters off one by one--except for the parallel storyline.
Being explained at the same time as all of this horror is what happened to the beings that were here but somehow died off, and why they came in the first place. Late in the film, David (Michael Fassbender), the first in a succession of androids to be introduced to the series, finds a key to the mystery, but as predicted, this goes horrible awry and lands the exploration team into ever deeper trouble. And on top of all that muddled, philosophical and astrological mess, there is yet another greedy plot by, wait for it . . . Weyland Corporation, a name true Alien fans will recognize.
Production Value The $13o,000,000 budget flexes its muscle here, and while the cast is strictly A-list for the three main roles, Scott knows how to get a lot out of his budget, even with shooting a large amount of principal photography on location. The spaceship (Prometheus) and the seemingly deserted structures on the planet are, of course, impeccably created. For Prometheus, Scott clearly had a very large visual (mostly digital, in fact) special effects team, as they show designs of some of the greatest and most appealing interfaces (bordering on dazzling, just for the electric-blue visuals) on alien spacecraft, and their own spaceship, as well as equipment that puts just about everything else, with the exception of Avatar's, to shame. The visual effects are mind-blowing, and are used so frequently that plot details have to be given away just to talk about them. This is where Prometheus truly shines.
Dialogue & Delivery Scott went a bit Blade Runner/2001: A Space Odyssey with the writing here, using it sparingly. Nonetheless, when lines or a monologue does come, it's often very philosophical and high thinking, but neither deeply moving nor befitting of an Alien movie. One of the two head writers here, Damon Lindelof, of Lost fame, certainly gets the mystery up like he used to, and it's still not fully fleshed out, and still like he just made it up as he went along, looking like he was given a get to point B from point A approach from Scott.
The other story here, however, is the dedicated performances from Fassbender and the as-yet-overlooked Charlize Theron (expedition leader, from Weyland Corp.), with Noomi Rapace adding some emotion, albeit with some added predictability. Fassbender plays cool, calculated, smooth David here, although delightfully retaining some wit and sentiment, showing that later revisions of the androids stray further and further away from what makes us human, ironically. When it comes to cold as one would expect David to be, you have to call in miss Theron, for an astounding turn as Meredith Vickers, the uncaring, only-take-a-calculated-risk, business woman that she plays brilliantly. Without her, the crew and the audience would have no one to hate, acting much like a mistrusting mother of a child that lies sometimes, but never when the stakes are high.
Verdict: With it's powerful performances by the leading players, but not much acting to do as a result of the script, and the muddled subplots of aliens and Weyland Corp., it's a shame Scott didn't just stick to a regular old Alien film, just the horror, even if that's a bit predictable. But don't forget the set design and visual effects team, that provides the biggest source of pleasure and wonderment from this two-hour film. I'd say a solid 6 out of ten. And yes, a chest does burst, if you were wondering.