Don't have high expectation of this movie

Rating: 3/10 (7 June 2012)

I watched this movie expecting that it would somewhat deliver a degree of excitement like Aliens or Avatar, but the fact is that the story is a total disappointment. If the movie is divided into three acts (set-up, confrontation and resolution)according to drama theory, the set-up is OK (the beginning of the story and the interior of Prometheus is reminiscent of the first Alien movie and the Nostromo)but the story starts to disorient after the spaceship has arrived at the alien planet. In particular, the order of things that previous alien movies have created (e.g. the alien creature starts from the egg to the face-hugger and finally to a humanoid creature) is not used. Instead, exactly how humans are infested with alien embryos is not clearly shown (e.g. the green liquid from the metal bottles or the snake-like creatures in the alien spaceship). Also, whether the squid-like embryo in the main character's body is a normal stage of the growth of the creature or just a coincidence (i.e. after having sex with an infected man) is also not clear. Worst of all, in the final scene, the human ancestor alien is killed by the squid-like creature which has also laid an egg into his body, and the egg later develops into a more traditional alien creature which bursts out from its body. I think the writer/director wants to use this scene to establish its legitimate link to the alien universe we are familiar with. However, it is of very limited value given all of the film's weaknesses. The final or resolution stage of the film is particularly disappointing. Indeed, the conflicts that have been weakly established (humans vs ancestor aliens vs other alien creatures) are not resolved at all. There is no big fight or escape scenes that audience would have expected in this kind of movies. The motive of the ancestor alien is also unclear (the movie leaves this open with the main character trying to go to their planet to find out, which I think does not work at all). Also, I think that this movie has borrowed a lot of elements from AVP-1. For example, an old man called Weyland summons an expedition team to search for aliens; the alien base is a storage/breeding place of aliens/bio-weapons using alien-related agents. However, AVP-1 at least tries to provide a back story to make sense of the relationship among the three parties(e.g. the predators use human bodies to breed aliens, and then hunt them as game animals) but Prometheus does not. And AVP-1 also has fight scenes to satisfy action movie fans. In my opinion, The Thing (2011), also a prequel to a horror SFX movie featuring alien creatures, is a much better movie in terms of narrative and story development. Prometheus should as best be viewed as a longer X-File-like episode.