The Greatest Voyage?

Rating: 2/10 (26 June 2012)

More like the Greatest Snorage.
Prometheus has a wonderful title but apart from that it is extremely lacking. As with a lot of films the best part about this flick is its trailer. The trailer promises action, excitement, and even on a couple of occasions, fear. However when the entire film steps up to deliver it falls spectacularly short.
Names are banded about like 'Incas' and 'Aztecs' though their significance to the plot and to humanity's history is never explored beyond they were a primitive people and aren't these pictographs interesting? We so no carbon dating or similar techniques. There is no explanation about how the characters could possibly know the dates of these drawings which are oh so significant, other than the fact they must be.
With the decision that these drawings must be an 'invitation' and not a screaming warning left by civilisations of the long distant past that could not be full understood without the proper context a mission is launched. This mission is to determine whether or not human life was created and/or comes from aliens. Right. So that's the premise of the film. So where does the fun start?
It doesn't. That nice sand storm seen in the trailer is little more than a ruse. It's timing in the movie doesn't just fall flat it proves to be a disappointment.
The little aliens themselves are less like Alien and more like those little wormy things out of Dreamcatcher which has ten times more heart, soul and interest than this story.
Are we supposed to care about these characters? Because it is impossible to care when none of them have any personality to speak of. There's no oomph, no oozing charisma, no twinkling eyes or air of J'ai ne sais quoi. All of them are more like androids that David played by Michael Fassbender who holds the most personality and interest out of all of them combined - AND HE'S THE ANDROID.
And then there's the creepy old man whom Charlize Theron doesn't get on well with at all. The only time any personality is seen from her character is when she gets a little mad and by then the whole world is going up in...well...I'd like to say smoke but it's so slow and dull and subtle that really it's a puff of invisible air. The creepy old man who's significance is never fully realised explains only David's motives, who, again, appears to be the only thing in this movie with something to do.
This movie gets two starts because it did not so utterly suck that I felt so immensely bored I almost walked out of the cinema, and because Michael Fassbender managed to put on an emotional yet emotionless performance. His acting allowed me to believe he was a creation pretending and acting like a human - sometimes getting it right, and sometimes not quite so much. But beyond that the main characters are so utterly dire that when their relationship falls apart nobody cares.
That's the problem with this movie. Nobody cares. And as for the Alien golden nuggets promised by Charilize Theron in her interviews...where were they?