Do androids dream of better scripts?

Rating: 4/10 (14 June 2012)

Prometheus is a pretentious, well acted, poorly scripted pile of wan*.
I entered this film with diminished expectations after hearing a few bad reviews but my expectations were not diminished enough. I had been expecting a slower more thoughtful film than Alien or its successors, but what I had not been expecting was a insipid, vacuous plot full of asinine characters.
The story takes a plunge right from the start into the big questions; on a seemingly primordial earth a suicidal alien (one of the Engineers or Space-Jockeys as they were known from Alien) commits suicide by drinking some black-goo on the edge of a waterfall and tumbles into the water where his DNA is deconstructed and then recombined by the goo.
Later in Scotland, with a plot device straight out of 1994's Stargate: ancient paintings are found from different cultures around the world all depicting a race of aliens (Engineers) and a constellation of stars with which to find them. This finding propels a crew of scientists across the galaxy in search of the depicted aliens and is bankrolled my mega-corp Weyland represented by the inhuman Vicars and the grown-up AI David. The science team is led by the archaeologists who found the drawings presumably because experts in ancient human art will be immeasurably useful for a first contact! But wait, there is an explanation here, they are proponents of an idea that people were created by these aliens (Engineers) and share some kind of common culture with them. David the android is then given the task of deciphering the roots of every language on Earth while the others whisk across the galaxy so that he can communicate with the aliens (Engineers) on arrival.
The big picture here is a particular take on Panspermia - in this case with an emphasis on the 'sperm' - with giant white, suicidal, elephantine helmeted aliens (Engineers) taking on the roll of the architects and creators of life. (I suppose it's not that much more ridiculous than a black box.) So with that big question out of the way in the first 5 minutes of the film we are left with a number of further questions: is our creator god, who created our creator, how does our creator feel about us? And the answer is: who cares? The problem with the rest of the film is that these kind of big questions need to be handled intelligently not penned in crayon. Just throwing questions at the audience with smattering of mythology does not an intelligent, engaging film make. But the biggest obstacle here is that the characters are just unbelievably stupid. Like their mothers were drunk the whole way through pregnancy stupid. The characters are more stupid then the characters in AVP:R, more so since the characters in AVP:R are supposed to be stupid teenagers, these are supposed to be scientist on a trillion dollar expedition to a new planet to find the origins of life.
Probably the quickest way to convey the unremitting catalogue of idiotic decisions taken by the characters is to list the good decisions made, so here it is: Vicars the supposed bad character wants to quarantine the definitely infected character outside the ship. That's it - one good decision! That left me with more fondness for her than the rest of the cast.
The rest of the crew are a bunch of helmet removing, location forgetting, black-goo swigging, door opening, infection hiding, snake petting imbeciles. Which brings me back to the Engineers. When the crew finally meet one in the flesh it turns out he is not a benign creator but a wrathful one. And frankly at this stage I would be as well. If I had put in the effort to create and nurture a new race I would be inconsolably pi**ed off that they had turned out that inane. From this point forward I was hoping that the Engineers would take off and bomb the Earth out of existence for everyone's sake.
Aliens has always relied on a certain amount of sexual queasiness to create its visceral shock, but it has always been a suggestion; in Prometheus it's out there. "How do you know it's a girl?" The reason I ask because it looks like a fricking giant pulsating dong! With the amount of shock moments delivered through betentacled oral penetration and gnashing vaginal consumption I began to worry Ridley Scott had decided to produce 'shokushu goukan'. But really it was the clumsiness with which all of this was handled that shocked me.
Honestly I am surprised by the lack of critical response on the IMDb for this mess. I have seen some serious mental somersaults and post hoc rationalisation being undertaken by the fanboys such as "the characters are supposed to be stupid. Weyland deliberately hired idiots because he wasn't interested in the successful outcome of the expedition." Seriously? He decides to fly across the galaxy with a crew of idiots; is that not the plot of Coneheads? The current high IMDb rating reminds me off the high rating of the Phantom Menace shortly after release. In the end you'll be out on your own having given the Phantom Menace 10 out of 10 stars.
I can only imagine it will only be a matter of time before Damon Lindelof's name becomes toxic; I look forward to that day.
4 out of 10