Why Prometheus is not a 10 or 9 (contains spoilers)

Rating: 8/10 (21 June 2012)

First, the positives: - The movie is entertaining and maintains one's curiosity and attention throughout. - The sets and technology on the ship are imaginative; the scenery is striking and the special effects are of high quality.
Now, reasons why it's not a 10 (or even a 9): - Poor characterization, no character development, and weak dialog: The captain of the ship behaves more like a janitor than a captain and so is very poorly defined. The only comment the geologist makes is "I love rocks". The make-up on the very old man (the company owner) is quite fake looking. The justifications that the two main scientists give for taking the trip are extremely weak. The company spent a trillion dollars for this trip. You would not expect them to hire such an uninspiring captain and such mediocre scientists. You would expect scientists to have at least a few highly intelligent observations to make, concerning what they are discovering. The blond (Vickers) has a lot of attitude (which is fine) and apparently has sex with the captain at one point just to prove to him that she is not a robot, but this potentially interesting subplot is completely dropped before it even gets going.

Many viewers might miss the following big, scientific problem: The alien humanoids (the "engineers") supposedly seeded the Earth to create humans, since human DNA is a descendant of the alien engineers' DNA (recall the first scene of an alien engineer disintegrating in an ocean). Unfortunately, there is a huge logical/scientific problem with this main plot revelation: There is a tremendous amount of modern genetic evidence that human DNA is related to all DNA on Earth (we share many genes with worms, squids, insects etc.). The evidence is overwhelming that we evolved from more primitive life-forms on Earth over 100s of millions of years. Therefore, how could the alien engineers have created us? There are two possibilities: 1. They seeded the Earth a billion year ago. 2. Alternatively, the alien engineers seeded the Earth specifically with human DNA just some hundreds or thousands of years ago. The problem with the first explanation is that, in this case, the alien engineers would have to be billions of years more advanced than humans and they clearly are not. Their technology appears to be at most a few hundred years more advanced than human technology. The problem with the second explanation is: If the alien engineers created human DNA only and seeded the Earth just a few thousand years ago, then how come our DNA shows such relatedness with all other DNA existing on Earth? One expects a big- budget film to have more intelligent scientific roles and more intelligent scientific debates. (If "Big Bang Theory" writers can generate compelling scientific dialog for each 25 minute sitcom then a big-budget film like Prometheus can afford to get some decent scientific consultants when writing the script.)

It is fascinating for humans to make their first encounter with an alien civilization and an alien space ship, but it's a disappointment for the viewer to discover that all that the ship contains is thousands of canisters of deadly xenomorphs. These xenomorphs are apparently destined for Earth (to destroy it) but xenomorphs are so deadly that probably only a few would be needed to do the job. The movie would have been much more interesting if the ship (of the humanoid, alien engineers) had been filled with other artifacts and technology, and held only a small, highly protected area (with messages posted of "warning! dangerous cargo, do not enter!") holding some xenomorphs that then get loose.

What made the first Alien movie so scary was that one never got a good look of the xenomorph and it would suddenly jump out in the dark. In Prometheus, most of the xenomorph-related scenes are in daylight and so are more action scenes and thus not as frightening as the original alien movies.

When Dr. Elizabeth Shaw is running from the alien spacecraft that is falling down on top of her, why doesn't she run at right angles to the path of its fall? The ship above her is enormous but she manages to escape it by just rolling on the ground at the last minute!

The movie is set in 2089 and it takes the ship only 2 years to reach its destination. I seriously doubt that humanity, in a mere 75 years from now, will have a ship that can travel to a nearby star that is even as close as, say, a few light years away. Even assuming an astonishingly improbable speed of 1/10th the speed of light, without a warp drive it would still take a ship at least 20 years to make the journey, not two. (Clearly the script writers didn't think worry about the scientific sophistication of the audience, but SciFi fans tend to know something about science.)

It will be interesting to see if a decent movie ever gets made (or even can be made) that is about Dr. Elizabeth Shaw's journey to find the home planet of the alien engineers in order to ask them why they are so intent on destroying humanity via the overkill method of dumping thousands of xenomorphs on Earth.