Dan O'Bannon we miss you ...

Rating: 1/10 (20 September 2013)

** I saw 'Prometheus' first June 2012 at a local 'Frank Theaters'. This review is based off my second viewing - of the Blue Ray release.
Ridley Scott's long anticipated return to the "Alien" universe, created by legendary (and then some) screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, is likely the most disjointed, illogical and poorly executed science fiction film ever created; it's a sloppy mess of dead-end plots and absurdly written characters sewn into a backdrop of unrivaled visual epiphany and flawlessly rendered spaceships.
Moments after act one begins on the heels of a visually immersive, intriguing prologue, the nonsensical slag that is all that will follow, hits pavement giddy feet running. Our heroes - scientists investigating a 35,000 year old cave painting of a distant star cluster - mention something about traveling "There, to find out." When the next scene fades in we're (sans explanation) aboard a spaceship watching an android, a higher functioning predecessor model of Ian Holm's 'Ash (from 'Alien'), fight the tedium of deep space solitude by learning dead languages, playing basketball while riding a bicycle and trimming his hair to resemble Peter O'Toole in 'Lawrence of Arabia'.
We learn android 'David' can read the dreams of crew members in hyper-sleep and experience human emotions. While I enjoyed the Asimovian flavor of David's introductory scenes, their illustration of his physical, emotional and adaptive capabilities as clearly superior to the advanced 'Ash' and 'Bishop' models of films set in the future of the universe, made no sense.
Get used to it! (things that make no sense) David wakes up the crew - largely staffed by characters we never really meet or even get to count present - and literally minutes after they shake off the hyper sleep lag with green slime meals aboard a clean, brightly lit, prettily rendered spaceship right out of Star Trek TNG, attend a corny briefing initiated by Guy Pearce (the hologram) and then descend into their target planet's atmosphere and find the spooky alien temple on the first pass.
Unlike the thickly atmospheric introductions to the instantly deep and likable crew of the 'Nostromo' and their sudden twist of fate, 'Prometheus' lighting quick brushes over a few of the crew members of its titular named spaceship with no more than a minimal smear of characterization. Who are these noisy, one dimensional stick figures, and why should we care? Not a one of them is endeared to us in the least, and the film does not care that we need (to care) in order for the whole sexy mess to mean something.
Without analysis of any kind - of the planet's surface or atmosphere, beyond a few one-liners shouted out on the way down - the anxious scientist romantic duo charge out into the alien environment after ruthless, robotic, severe and Barbie doll like 'Meredith Weyland-Vickers' (Charlize Theron) squashes the hopes they've traveled light years to realize - with a comical verbal beat down that we were supposed to take seriously.
Captain Idris Elba parked the ship a mile from the ruin so our heroes must speed to its entrance in tracked vehicles and roll cage enclosed ATVs - and later outrun a super sand storm in another scene. Oh, the drama. Once inside, the dank, eerie alien temple is easily mapped by the team's grumpy geologist and everyone finally takes off the egg shaped spacesuit helmets the prop department built after shopping at Radio Shack because (drum roll) the air is breathable. No worries about xeno bacteria or viruses or whatever. They find some dead aliens (no, not xenomorphs) but the team biologist would rather head back to the ship because they freak him out (yes, you read that correctly).
Black Goo (yes, really) ends up for no apparent motivation in the bubbly of boy wonder scientist who then - via his contaminated semen - impregnates 'Elizabeth Shaw' (Noomi) with a dolphin-octopus fetus but only after she explodes an alien head with too much voltage and reveals she's sterile. She cuts it out in a surgical pod which staples up her gut (no one notices the scar) and minutes later, she's running around the set again.
One dimensional crew and expedition members taunt one another into sex with an accordion, fry one of our heroes with a chrome plated flame thrower, battle a zombie caveman thing, die before we meet them, fall prey to an albino snake thing, get sprayed by acid blood across the kisser, and with smiles and jokes, commit suicide at the end.
The visuals are mostly unmatched. The spaceship interiors ridiculous; the crews sleep in tubes, why give them neo art deco quarters decorated with strange personal effects? Charlize Theron plays the villain like a junkyard dog grinding its teeth and there is no depth. There is no continuity. The script abruptly severs one plot line, throws us another, cuts off that one and jumps its tracks to go somewhere else. We see an Alien (ala 'Alien') on the wall of the spooky temple, but no one ever tells us why it is there. Our heroine's aborted dolphin-octopus thing evolves into a two ton face hugger, but why? Our eight foot tall blue complexioned gods crush our bones on sight, why? David the android O'Toole poisons our hero. Again, why? Where Dan O'Bannon's 1979 screenplay 'Alien' immersed us in a suffocating claustrophobic environment populated by interesting, endearing and memorable characters and then blew our minds with mist shrouded eggs, face hugging arachnids, a chest bursting alien birth and a truly demonic new monster (with loving respect to H.R.Geiger), Prometheus does none of these things yet so poorly imitates all of them that its effort comes across as blatantly shameful and feels (to die-hard fans of O'Bannon's fictional universe), like a speeding bullet of heresy.