Incompetent as both story-telling and film-making

Rating: 1/10 (11 June 2012)

Alien was a game changer when it came out. The reason you would want the director of that movie to resume after 30 years, is that he would being his extremely high standards to what has become a pretty bad franchise. Aggravatingly, all we see on every front (score, narrative, structure, imagination) is the lowest of low standards. Prometheus is not a game-changer. It's even worse than the lesser Alien movies, which makes it something like "Attack of the Laser Squids from Planet Terror!!!"
The two good entries in the Alien series did thoughtful things with the form (Alien, Aliens). The others had no idea what to do, so they just threw things at the screen (Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, AvP, Alien goes to the Suburbs). Having abandoned the high quality of his youth, Ridley Scott now embraces half-assed scripts like those later titles. Scott cashed in - all his effort for Prometheus went into becoming a showman; working the pre-release ballyhoo to generate a big payday. The short vids that were made to promote this suggested something unusual. Instead it's desperately 'usual.' It's his George Lucas self-destruct moment. This hackneyed dreck was not even worth filming.
The title spaceship is not interesting. The threat here is not interesting. It has the most laughable aging make-up I've seen in 50 years. The characters are a complete slate of bellicose dopes. And the climax is the usual "We don't have a climax so why don't we just film nine rotten clichés in a row?" I can't believe Scott thinks viewers waited 33 years for answers this feeble. Geiger's alien was elegant / thoughtful. For the first time, when a movie finally showed the alien, it was awesomely horrible and did not disappoint. Here we're back to stupid aliens from 1950s throwaway drive-in date movies. The alien gestation makes no sense anymore (as with Alien 3). A snake, apparently issuing from drops of black oil will attack you and kill you, and then you grow larger, gain superhuman powers and become aggressive (!) . If you ingest a drop of the black oil you will become the host of an alien that bursts out your head (!!!). If you make love to a human who is symptomatic, you will get knocked up with an alien squid. That alien squid will grow into a tentacled dumb thing that has nine mouths on the underside, which in turn gives birth to sharkhead (!!!!!). There is no reason to spend any more time describing the lousy, cut-rate path this horrible movie takes. Every answer it provides is a dumb one.
Having no good ideas on where to take the series, Ridley Scott steals ideas from the X Files movie, Species, Splice, AVP and Contact. It's big idea, seen in countless movies since 2001, is now being thoroughly exhausted on the laughable TV show, Ancient Aliens. A father/daughter shocker is lifted straight from an Angela Lansbury movie from 1948 (State of the Union). The horny and dumb level of the proceedings is like watching "Temptation Island" the gutter level reality show. And Laurence of Arabia is included for no reason whatsoever.
Prometheus does not summon up the quality of Alien in any way. Instead it reminds a viewer mostly of two rotten pieces of low-grade schlock: Event Horizon (1997) and Super Nova (2000), movies that started by asking interesting questions, but then retreated into asinine developments, due to terrible writers looking for cop-outs.
Prometheus deserves to be as little known as those two clunkers. The test of whether this is a worthy product to associate with Scott's original alien film, lies in asking the question: On its own, could this movie have ever generated as much buzz/response as the original? The answer is a resounding No. This rotten, rotten movie will influence nothing. Put Scott out to pasture where he can graze on his greenbacks. The best thing you can say about this irritating, stupid movie is that it will be gone from theaters in 3 weeks.