Absolutely dreadful

Rating: 1/10 (3 June 2012)

This movie was awful. Solid acting performances are undermined by a preposterous premise, prepubescent philosophising and gaping inconsistencies. Why was an archaeologist (or palaeontologist?) also adept at surgery, neuroscience, anaesthesia and genetic biology? Being called "Dr" doesn't mean you're a skilled polymath, particularly not one with a working knowledge of the specialist surgical equipment market. Why do creatures with exactly our DNA look radically different to us? And why are their neurons not subject to autolysis after 2 millennia?
Very few of the characters' choices make any sense, from the first character on screen using himself as a channel to propagate life, rather than creating a chemical gumbo which would achieve the same thing, to their decision as polymath scientists to handle alien pathogens without protective clothing, to one character's decision to play with an alien that looked like a cross between a vagina and a cobra (people other than their regular handler should think twice before playing with either) that was hissing at him. The characters acted randomly, with no clear motive and often no conceivable motive, although assuming the Engineers' belief in a religion would explain some of their psychopathic murdering, blithe genocide, overcomplicated architecture and the suicide at the beginning.
However, basic concepts haven't been thought through. Somebody here suggested that we were to be destroyed because we'd reached the installation and woken the sleeping engineer, but of course they'd been delayed in destroying us by 2000 years, so that can't be the reason. And the brilliant philosophising defending the concept of a god - "They made us, but who made *them*" is easily and immediately answered. Maybe they evolved? Or their creator's creator evolved. We know that RNA can form spontaneously from assembled polymers so why not? Just because you can engineer biosystems doesn't mean you haven't evolved from chemicals. The film seems to argue that all life currently on Earth was seeded simultaneously (if not, the human race needs to have been inserted into an existing evolutionary biosystem that already contained bunnies and Neanderthals and such), therefore all them fossils we've been digging up that we thought preceded each species' common ancestors were also put there by these nutty bipolar aliens. Seeing a strand of human DNA floating about in a primordial river, I was reminded of John Cleese's line in The Life Of Brian - "Where's the foetus going to gestate? You gonna to keep it in a bag?". You can't just chuck some DNA in a river and expect a human to form underwater.
A Director's Cut might make some of this clearer, but it wouldn't get around some of the crummy science and bizarre character motives. Take the geologist, for instance, who gets lost trying to walk away from the search team after they find an alien (what was he expecting?) dead by a door. His helmet is melted to his face by alien (hydroflouric?) acid blood. He later drags himself back to the ship motivated by either vengeance or zombieism (the lifegiving goo has different effects each time, natch - if you're a chap it turns you into a piñata, a contortionist zombie or makes your leg fall off, but if you're a lady, exactly the same goo will leave your DNA untouched but it'll reactivate your withered reproductive system and cause an 8 pound squid to grow inside you within 24 hours with no baby bump, extreme hunger or pain, which you can detach from your spinal column with no injury via a hefty tug) and starts throwing punches, Queensbury Rules. He was only in that position because his mate decided to play with Gynocobra and his plight went undetected because trillionaire heiress ice queen Theron suddenly melted and hopped into bed with the ship's captain, because he explained the provenance of his accordion and accused her of being an android, leaving the bridge unattended.
Rather than try to hail the stranded men the next morning, and play the footage from their helmet cams when they didn't respond, our now post- coital heroes "suit up" and charge back into the temple accompanied by an android who's stopped following their instructions and taken to experimentally pushing any buttons he comes across in there, none of which bothers them.
This android, incidentally, must have a very sticky head, because after discombobulation it remains exactly in situ despite the circular ship he's in crashing, and making several rotations on the ground. Come to think of it, everything's still in situ so maybe it's just another egregious lapse in logic.
By this point, what could have been visually atmospheric sets just seem to be illogical. Why did the Engineers build a military facility out of heavy and hard-to-clean patterned, die-cast steel? Why have weapons with the ability to seed or destroy a planet been left with no automated security? Why can the characters touch light? Why is the ship's computer activated by playing a flute? Why was there no flute holder for the flute since it was integral? Is it because the Engineers each have their own flute?
As you're watching this film, you're initially giving its oddities the benefit of the doubt, and it's only afterwards that the full horror of what you just saw starts to sink in. It seems inconceivable that good PR or threat of personal injury weren't behind some of the fawning reviews I've seen and Wossy's two word review "Oh dear" rather sums it up for me, rather than Elliot Noble's more misleading effort which can be found above.
It's a silly film, best avoided. If he's going to do the same to Blade Runner, I may just have to start leaving copies of the original in hotel rooms like Giedeons bibles.