More bewilderment, frustration and disappointment from the once great movie maker.

Rating: 4/10 (16 November 2012)

Quite what possessed Ridley Scott to revisit his 1979 sci-fi masterpiece, Alien, (surely one of the greatest movies ever made) and produce this bizarre sequel/prequel is anyone's guess but I do so wish he hadn't.
Perhaps he was simply tired of other film-makers relentlessly cashing in on the Alien franchise (presumably worth billions) but if in making this film his intention was to reclaim Alien as his own creation (yes Ridley, we get it) then for me, it has completely the opposite effect. It's a little like watching a remake of its outstanding forebear done more in the style of the many, vastly inferior, sequels and spin offs.
There are numerous moments in this film when the viewer is left scratching their head but the one overriding question eclipsing them all is: Why? Why would you do this? Why would you make a lesser version of your own masterpiece?
Michael Fassbender is superb (no surprises there) as the beautiful, aloof artificial human with his own agenda but nothing will ever match Ian Holmes as science officer Ash, the father of all creepy androids. Noomi Rapace is very good in the feisty heroine role and there is a terrific scene in a 'fully automated medical procedure pod' (a machine which can perform medical operations, automatically) but she isn't Ripley. This wouldn't matter of course, if for only one nanosecond one was allowed to take this film on its own merits but just as you begin to be drawn into a subplot or character one is smacked around face with another Alien reference. From the moment the credits appear this film sets itself up to be compared. Similar characters, similar scenes, lines of dialogue, props, even the plot loosely follows that of the original.
And when it's not referencing Alien its drawing on all manner of other sci-fi films. Everything from Space Odyssey to The X-Files, in fact, until what you have isn't so much a new creation as a strange Frankenstein's Monster of a movie. Certainly not the ground-breaking work we were all promised before its release.
One of the most stunning things about Alien is Scott's depiction of space itself. Not the bountiful, populace universe of Star Wars, Star Trek and other typical sci-fi of its day but a vast, terrifyingly desolate place where his players were like specs of dust utterly alone in a hostile, godless universe. Prometheus, on the other hand, has all the ego of a Hollywood mainstream blockbuster where mankind is not only the centre of the universe but apparently populating a lot it.
Maybe this is what's happened to Scott's own ego. I think I liked his work better when he was a peripheral but brilliant film-maker.