A Z-Grade Film With An A-List Budget

Rating: 2/10 (6 November 2012)

Prometheus is probably the largest-budget piece of garbage I've ever seen. It does an amazing job of wasting otherwise capable talent and proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that whatever skill Ridley Scott had in crafting the original Alien film was magic that worked once and once only.
The only character played with any degree of aptitude is the woefully underused Vickers, portrayed perfectly by Charlize Theron. But like most all of the cast, the viewers aren't given a chance to get to know the characters except in the most superficial way, and the characters the script inexplicably concentrates on are the least interesting and poorest-acted, namely Shaw and Holloway. Vickers should have been the heroine of the film; if they have any sense, they'll find some way to sidestep (pun intended) and bring back her character if they do a sequel...which I sincerely hope they won't, but fear they probably will anyway.
Michael Fassbender's David is attractive in his own way, but also underdeveloped even though most of the scenes revolve around him...inexplicably. He has an attractiveness that makes the viewer want to like him and be interested in him, but there's not a lot in the script for the talented actor to work with...and thus, we're left with only his natural charm, which is stunted in the awkward role, with a walk that looks constantly like his underpants have crept up the cleft of his buttocks.
No character acts sensibly or logically, no-one has any clear or reasonable motivation, and none of them is given enough time to develop so that we as viewers care at all about whether they live or die. In fact, this is such a low grade of film because of its amateurish attempt at portraying characters; we simply do not care. It is impossible to sympathise with anyone (aside from Vickers, if only because she actually believes in taking realistic precautions), and the story unfolds at a snail's pace and then ends up never resolving a single plot point that it introduced during its superfluous length.
The monsters are afterthoughts, and very poorly-designed to have allegedly taken advantage of Giger. The whole thing is a huge mess and proves quite ably that a giant budget and a 'name' director are not enough to save a plodding mess of a script that apparently didn't go through any revisions past a first draft. It's a shame that better films often don't receive the green light or a fraction of the budget that Prometheus did, and Prometheus still was terrible, fakey-looking (even in the scenes that weren't filled with CGI, despite Scott's claims) and cheap.
I didn't believe the reviews could be right in how harsh they were, but this really is one of the worst films I have ever sat through, without exaggeration. I have watched films that were bad but tried much harder, and I have watched films that were good but had less resources. There is no excuse for a film with this one's pedigree and budget to be as awful as it is, and thus it deserves a harsher judgement.
Prometheus is a turd, and not even a polished one. It's a first-draft, barely passable mess that isn't saved by its handful of good actors, because actors can only do so much with a lacking script, and even good actors flounder with a lousy director, as Scott has proved he is.
Avoid this. And hope that a sequel is not approved.