Great looking but too complicated plot

Rating: 7/10 (13 June 2012)

Ridley Scott is back with another science fiction/horror movie after desiring for long to explore the unaddressed story behind the ship on planet LV-426 of Alien (1979), the host of the eggs aboard and the mysterious pilot or space jockey in the control seat.
In Prometheus we follow a team of explorers that discover a clue of the origins of mankind on Earth, pursuing the answers to a far-away planet; not to different from the Earth itself. There they encounter terrifying things they did not expect to find.
Ridley Scott is known to be a great visual director, and in that aspect he does not disappoint. Every visual detail is very well though and the world it creates looks amazing.
The first half of the film is fantastic, introducing the characters, their different motives for this expedition and setting up the story. Then the plot gets very complicated, too complicated actually. There are a lot of things left open-ended or not explained and that might be very disappointing for some. Maybe they are left like this for explaining with another movie or movies? Ranking behind the visuality are the performances which are very good. Michael Fassbender steals the show portraying a human looking droid with no real feelings who has the job to take care of the crew. The rest of the cast also does a fine job. If you can complain about the cast, casting Guy Pearce as the very old man, who was the impetus behind the expedition, doesn't feel like the right decision. Making a young man appear old always looks like a man wearing a lot of make-up; why not cast someone who is really old? Additionally, the characters of Idris Elba, Janek, and his flight assistants seemed to lack screen-time for the audience to understand them better and their key actions.
You can't help but to compare Prometheus to Ridley's earlier Alien. The plot of Alien is very simple; the crew on a mining ship finds alien eggs, it impregnates people and kills the crew one by one. But in Prometheus the plot is much more complicated and leaves you with so many open ended things, which is questionably the correct recipe for a movie. Also although there are fine performances and dialogues in Prometheus, the dialogues in Alien feel so real, almost like they were all improvised.
Prometheus offers some excellent scenes in awesome-looking sets with good cast performances. But on the other hand it the plot is very complicated which increases the chance of blundering, which sometime looks to happen. A slight disappointment but nonetheless a good movie – 8/10