Carry On Up Your Oesophagus

Rating: 1/10 (15 October 2012)

I watched this, in spite of its chequered reception, on a long haul flight from Beijing.
First I watched Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge five times. Then Treehouse of Horror XXII three times. Then The Lorax. Realising I had 4 hours left to fly and not a celluloid rat's chance in hell of falling asleep I succumbed to morbid curiosity and finally watched Prometheus. It turns out my time would have been better spent watching The Lorax twice more. It did at least have a story arc and characters with consistent and somewhat believable personalities and goals.
This film has been comprehensively and rightfully panned by so many before me there's no need to go into specifics. The root of the problem is that nothing anyone does or says in this film follows any internal logic or has any significance - even if we ignore that it's supposed to provide the back story for the two non-risible Aliens films, something it utterly fails even to begin to do. A great deal fell into place when I heard the screenwriter was also responsible for 'Lost'. Much like that, the film raises more questions than it answers and manages to do it in such a moronic fashion that you cease caring about the premise.
Take, for example, Charlize Theron's character, who draws the interest early on as an uncompromising, cagey sort with some hidden agenda you're sure will be as instrumental to the plot as the cheap revelation her accommodation just happens to be a self-sustaining life support system. This goes absolutely nowhere. Or the Silly Putty-faced tycoon with motivations of his own who turns out to be her dad and has travelled along with the expedition to boot. Does this 'revelation' end up mattering? No. Are his motives ever explained? No. Does either character in fact count for anything? Absolutely not.
As with the effects, more is not better. Bring back gritty and understated, bring back a small cast and get shot of effects-led films in toto.
You can't use the realism defence either. There is none. I get that humans aren't rational (though if you were selecting 17 people for the greatest expedition in the history of mankind you could do far better than this lot) and that life doesn't follow a script but this film is just a sequence of random, barely connected events chucked together in a a basically dream-like fashion.
I can point to no finer example of this Aliens for the ADHD generation than the whole sequence surrounding Dr Shaw's birth. She finds out she's pregnant, beats up her retainers, goes through the whole farcical caesarean scene, somehow forgets that she left aborto-squid in the surgery and resumes her place in the crew without anyone even asking where she's been.
And how much further forwards are we when the credits roll? So it turns out we're possibly the progeny of Mussolini-headed, teal, douche beings who despite having the technology to construct enough colossal starships that several lie buried in perfect working order around some biological firing range of a planet, can't find any more efficient means to exterminate the human race than a volatile mealworm / cobra / squid / penis hybrid that is also lethal to THEM and which they cannot control. I can hardly wait for the sequel.
This film was worse than Aliens Resurrection. And that is no mean feat.