Ridley's lost it

Rating: 3/10 (10 June 2012)

Questions, questions, questions. There's plenty of spoilers here. You've been warned.
1) The drawings. Ancient civilizations made them, and at best they were a rough guess of what was seen hours or even days earlier. You expect us to believe that they got the positioning so spot on that in a galaxy of 200 billion stars that we were able to find the exact one they were pointing to based on five stars?
2) Why was Guy Pearce cast as the old man? Aren't there any old men still acting in Hollywood these days that could have played the part more convincingly? Perhaps this was some tie-in to the 2001 old man scene since the makeup job was done about as well (read: awful makeup job).
3) The ship's engines are firing full blast through the emptiness of space. Kubrick got it right in 2001, now Ridley comes and gets it wrong again. Basic Physics 101: a body in motion tends to stay in motion until it is acted upon by an outside force. There are no appreciable forces acting against your ship, so the ship doesn't slow down even when the engines are off. You're just burning up fuel pushing against a force that isn't there.
4) So in a whole five years time they went from seeing drawings on the wall of a cave on Earth to convincing the right people that "this means something" to building this ship to traveling who knows how far across the galaxy (because that wasn't explained either) to ending up at their destination? Have they figured faster-than-light travel in less than 100 years from now? Then they pop through the atmosphere at the exact spot they need to be at?
5) Why did they spend all this money to send what amounts to a ship full of misfits, jerks, and nitwits to make contact with an alien civilization? Really, these were the best candidates they had? Charlie is as a grade-A jerk who goes out of his way to insult David at every opportunity. The 'geologist' looks more like a maladjusted skinhead than someone you'd expect to have a PhD under his belt if he managed to get a ticket on this ship. His cohort that follows him acts like he was dropped on his head as an infant.
6) Father? Really? That was just plain pointless. Served no purpose at all.
7) If you see an interstellar cobra with a full set of working teeth rear its head at you in a place you have no idea how something is even alive in, do you a) stay away from it until you know what it is, b) talk and coo after it like it's a pet and try and touch it several times despite repeated threats, or c) put your helmet back on and get the heck out of there? Our engineers picked the wrong answer. I mean whose train of thought would be "aww maybe it's friendly" when something pops it head up out of a pool of black slime? Do creatures that survive in almost impossibly hostile environments like this tend to be friendly?
8) You're on another planet in a dark, dank, cavernous place. Just outside of this place the atmosphere is toxic. So what do you do? You take your helmet off of course. Who needs those, right? Helmets are for nerds! If the air smells OK, it must be OK. Airborne diseases? Atomized ancient alien body parts? What could possibly happen? All that matters is that it's breathable.
Overall this movie is a whole lot of turkey. It does have its moments, though, like the star map scene that, I'm guessing, shows a map of all the planets they've brought life to. That was done beautifully. The get-this-thing-out-of-me scene had me squirming in my seat, but then later when you see how humongous that thing has become, the obvious question is "what has it been eating in there to go from the size of a chihuahua to the size of a water buffalo"? The answer is "nothing".
There are too many people in this movie! You could get rid of half the cast and they wouldn't be missed. Why did there need to be a captain AND whomever Charlize Theron was supposed to be? Why couldn't she have been the captain?
This is definitely a prequel to Alien, but Alien made MUCH more sense than this movie.