An unexceptional, average movie ...

Rating: 5/10 (6 November 2012)

Scientifically, this movie was as awful as everyone else has said, and I would agree with all the plot holes. But sometimes, it's a good thing to turn off your brain and just be entertained.
There are some criticism from other reviewers that I would have to disagree with, but mainly just to take the devil's side of an argument.
For example, when the scientists land on the planet and the geologist freak's out about seeing a centuries old corpse, but when he sees an actual live alien life form, he gets all happy, excited and even giddy. Well, it could be that this alien life form emits a pheromone that causes people in close proximity to react that way. The other scientist seems to be a bit more reserved when he sees the same alien life form, but then again, he wasn't as close to it as the scared geologist was.
The android, David, does seem to have more knowledge than he lets on, and even I could see that Weyland was going to make a "surprise" appearance on the ship, and one could even guess his motives, and it wasn't going to be the same motives as the Weyland in AVP.
Ridley Scott could have gone a long way to improve this movie's plot by tying in closer to AVP. Some of David's knowledge, and that of Vickers and Welyand could have come from the AVP storyline. As well as integrated more of the Alien Origin (though I can't say this with confidence, because I didn't even realize this movie existed until after watching Prometheus last night and coming on this board to make this review, but I'm going to watch it now and see what I could have possibly missed).
The one thing that really bothers me about the whole time line of the entire franchise is that AVP was set in modern day times, while this movie was set in the future, but the end of this movie seems to be the birth of the race that we have come to know from the Alien storyline. Or, at least that is how it seems to me. There is no indication that these "Alien" aliens have been 'birthed' before we humans show up on this planet ... and yet, at the same time, something devastating happened at this planet/outpost, why is there no evidence that things "got out of control"? Except for one dead body of an "engineer" that lost his head (sorry, couldn't resist the pun).