So why is Prometheus a dull film?

Rating: 5/10 (8 June 2012)

So why is Prometheus a dull film? There's obviously a lot of money sloshing around; the direction is okay and the SFX is okay. What went wrong? The major, glaring flaw is the script and dialogue. To quote the great Bart Simpson, "I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows."
SPOILERS AHEAD: The first Alien film is rightly a sci-fi masterpiece. One area where Alien clearly excels over Prometheus is in the crew interaction. Prometheus is a very similar film (in fact it's actually a remake: aliens, far away, android crew member is evil etc etc); the crew are on a spaceship (more or less) and stuff goes wrong, people die, aliens cruise around etc etc. Except that in Prometheus the people are artificial (and I don't mean the android); there's no realistic interaction between any of the crew. They don't talk to each other at all about what is going on. Some of them die, and there's NO conversation. Not even a tense _lack_ of conversation. Some of the crew are trapped in the alien base, and no one cares that they were left behind (except the poor trapped guys obviously). Charlize Theron burns one of the crew alive and there's NO mention of it afterwards. I cannot stress this enough. It is a fault so massive that I can only assume that Ridley Scott and the other people involved were deaf, since that's the only way you'd miss it. It's artificial and fake, and it sucks the heart right out of the film. Whoever wrote the dialogue ought to be ashamed of themselves and quit screen writing.
There's also very, very few scary moments (the R rating appears to come completely from a single scene, which is also rather dull except for the squirm factor). Instead, the writers have decided that awe-inspiring alien vistas and star-map holograms are more important. What this functionally translates into is a lack of tension in the entire film. That's Ridley Scott's fault, and it's obvious that he's lost his touch here.
Overall, it's dull, lifeless, and empty. Which is a shame because the ingredients are all there. It's just that the chef can't read the recipe correctly. 5 out of 10. Catch it on DVD. It's not worth cinema prices.