Never have I seen such a horrible movie

Rating: 1/10 (6 July 2012)

There are spoilers in this review, but don't you worry. This movie isn't worth spoiling. It isn't as though telling you the plot with ruin anything. In fact, it might spare you the torture of sitting through this debacle of a cinematic experience.
I did not want to see this movie simply because I knew that it was supposed to be a prequel to Alien and Aliens. I am a huge Alien and Aliens fan, and I even enjoyed Alien VS Predator - the first one. I was convinced that Prometheus would fail to live up to the incredible story, suspense, effects, and acting of its predecessors. And, I was absolutely right. The bottom line was that I was out of power in one hundred degree heat and an air-conditioned theater with Prometheus had to be better than dying a slow, painful death in my sauna of a home. No, I think I would have taken the sauna and heat stroke.
Where do I begin? Ah yes, the story. The script was confused, dull, anti-climatic, and struggled to find a link to Alien. I could have written numerous unrelated words on a large dart board, throw darts at these words, put them together on paper, and it would have been a more interesting, concise, and clear script. To begin, the opening scene of this movie is one of these big, white, muscled Martians on some planet. He drinks these black dots on purpose, yielding complete disintegration of his body. This has nothing to do with later things, and it makes no sense in connection to the movie. As we discover, the black goop is somehow the start of the aliens we know from the movie alien. When someone comes in contact with it, they're infected and turn into some weird infected guy. Somehow, if someone infected has sex, the woman gets impregnated with some huge alien embryo thing and it grows into a big other thing that looks nothing like anything - maybe a giant squid spider - and it infects yet another human and a whole alien (finally looking like the aliens we know and love) bursts out of the human body. Mind you, it takes the whole movie to explain this process and it isn't even until the end that the alien arrives. This life cycle is confusing and nowhere near as sensible as the one in Alien or Aliens. There, the queen lays eggs, the eggs birth the spider things that implant the baby alien in a human, the human host gives birth to a baby alien, and the baby alien grows to a big badass.
Not only is the life cycle off, but the story lacked interesting characters and real drive. The whole reason they went to this planet is so some old man could talk to these human alien people in an effort to save his life. This old guy's robot son has infected the human crew and worked against them the entire movie, just to find a live human alien for his old guy "dad" to talk to. Kind of kills the suspense. Everyone basically dies, except the main woman whose acting is as horrible as the writing for her character. I didn't care about anyone and hoped everyone would die. It was disappointing to see that she, oh and the robot, did survive. Most of the movie was spent exploring or on the ship talking about research and "Why are we here? Who made us? What is the reason for life?" It was more of a religious/spiritual/philosophical snore-fest than the action/suspense promised by a movie in the Alien franchise.
The acting? Horrible. Coming from someone who has worked professionally as an actor and majored in theatre in college, you can trust me when I say that it was terrible. No emotion. No intent. It was a bunch of random people no one has heard of spouting their lines like those parrots you pass in toy stores. You know, you say something and they repeat it in a mechanical and single toned manner. The characters had no layers. They were similar to the stock characters found in commedia dell'arte of Italy or noh/kabuki theatre of Japan. In these forms, a character is one note and represents a single thing. A villain is a villain, a lover is a lover, a hero a hero, etc. That was this movie. The blonde? The bitch. The main chick? A true believer. Etc etc etc. I would expect such singular acting from an old comedy, but I expect something more engaging for the silver screen.
The only good thing about this movie was the opening credits. It was beautifully done, albeit out of place. The other good thing about the movie? The ending credits. I left faster than if the place were on fire. If you want to see an interesting movie that connects to Alien or Aliens, don't hold your breath. Bring a pillow and a blanket. Take a nap. You won't miss anything.