By Scott, It's Undewhelming...Again!

Rating: 6/10 (7 June 2012)

It certainly looks the business, all beautifully composed sleek shiny surfaces and rugged epic landscapes. Unfortunately Prometheus is dull and flat in terms script and of direction, as the majority of Scott's films are. That's not to say he can't deliver, he can, but there are more passable Ridley Scott films than visionary ones - to be fair, most directors never once deliver a film that changes the cinematic landscape while RS can lay claim to at least two, even if they were a chunk of time ago.
Prometheus is set in the same universe as Alien but it's not a direct prequel. If the Alien franchise is about the alien, in all its variations, and how humans tried to deal with it - badly - then Prometheus is about us humans. All the talk about the alien is a sideshow, it's not central to the film, and arguably the film might have been a lot more interesting if it didn't feel the need to deal with the creature.
But it does. And not in a satisfying way.
Instead of being one thing or the other, the film stumbles about and falls flat on its face. It asks the big searching questions about who we are during the first half, and in the second half it decides they don't really matter when all you're doing is trying to survive. Which is what happens when you potter off into the vast unknown in search of something with nothing but belief to defend yourself.
Alien was wound tight in terms of its minimalism, a handful of actors confined to a small place faced with a dangerous alien. Aliens took it up a notch and swapped hidden terrors for relentless battle action. Both films were strung out on tension, with the humans under siege and in danger of being wiped out.
The problem for Prometheus is that it's not tight enough to have the elegant simplicity of Alien, nor relentless enough to pull you along in a rush of excitement like Aliens. The characters and dialogue are mostly inept and shallow, there's simply too many people who have no purpose other than to be bland, mumble something inane and die. Not one character is as memorable as the crew of Alien or Aliens.
Fassbender's David is fine (Bishop was better), Rapace's Shaw is fine (Ripley was better), Theron's Vickers is fine (Burke was better), Elba's Janeck is fine (Dallas was better), and that's the problem: everything's okay up to a point, a bit above average in terms of surface gloss and celebrity heads, but with nothing that really stands out as being clever or memorable (aside from the youtube virals that preceded it). Even the few 'gory' bits are uninspired and lackluster and CGI meh - herself was completely comfortable with what was served up and she gets tense watching Harry Potter.
That it's that safe (being not in the least bit scary/thrilling) and that dumb (with a plot that leaks like a sieve when any logic is thrown at it) is hugely disappointing. That's a big problem for a franchise that once traded on thrills and spills.
6/10 is being generous.