Prometheus asks 20 questions, and gives us only 4 answers.

Rating: 5/10 (17 June 2012)

I feel like this movie asked 20 very big questions, the kind you are just waiting for the directors answer to, the kind that makes you leave the cinema with an enriched﻿ sense of being and awareness, and Scott only gave us like 4 truly unfulfilling answers. Looking past some of the inconsistencies with the alien franchise, some poor acting from support roles, and some logical flaws in the way the movie played out, the ultimate premise for me just wasn't answered, and i feel whilst the movie nobly tried to delve into universal truths, it failed. The movie tried to answer too many questions at once, and never really answered any of them.
It leads us on to believe that humanity exists with purpose, and that 'our makers' are a noble, intelligent and purposeful kind, being one that would leave a map for us to use when we were ready to come find them, however ultimately resolves to tell us that we were made "just because we could be" and that we were intended to be exterminated for no real reason. I fail to see why a race that made us just because they could, would go to such an effort to lead us to a planet which was never even meant﻿ to reveal any truths to us or answer any of humanity's questions, rather the planet turned out just to be a "cargo hold" for the unnecessarily dangerous biological weapon made to kill us.
I feel more that the movie centered around very much the same notions as in blade-runner, and that is the dangers of untethered scientific endeavor and of the importance of purpose in all sentient life - culminating mainly in exploring what qualities seem to be universal to intelligent life, and to this credit, fassbender's character David did a great job acting as a symbol of﻿ these questions in his inquisitive and intriguing nature. But where in blade runner, Scott resolves to tell us that all intelligent life is important, and has worth and value regardless of whether the reason for their existence is a satisfying one or not, rather the ultimate answer they reach in Prometheus is a vastly more unfulfilling one.
The answer the movie seemed to give was cripplingly unsatisfying, resolving that﻿ ultimately, life is unimportant, a toy which can be played with by those who possess the power to create and destroy it. A specific line from the movie by the male scientist even essentially spelled this resolve out to us, and furthered by the female scientists response to David when asked "why is it then that i was made", and "because you can" is not the kind of thought provoking existential answer i had hoped for. In this regard, the movie was unsatisfying.
I understand taking this movie so philosophically can be dangerous when rating a movie simply as a source of entertainment, but aside from some stunning CGI, the movie even failed in this respect. There was not the kind of tension that i found in alien, and because of the movies lack of character development, i found that i largely couldn't care less when most of the characters died either by a predictable alien attack or were crushed by the ship. In this respect, even the brutal deaths weren't entertaining because you didn't care when people died, and with some of the actors forcing terrible accents out of their mouths, you almost wanted them to die for no other reason for them to shut up. The only characters i seemed to slightly enjoy with was the largely standard down to earth, order-defying, noble martyr of a captain who just seemed to fail to have any less than bad-ass bones in his body, and the old and frail Weyln who was very reminiscent of Tyrell from Scott's earlier work (leaving out of course the intrigue of the character David which i have already mentioned).
Thus, as a whole, this movie disappointed me, i left the cinema with less worth and understanding of the self then when i entered it, and whilst i can't deny i was entertained, most of why i enjoyed it was because it raised these questions, and gave me the opportunity to hate upon Ridley Scott's answer (or lack of) to them. So with these all considered i am only left to give this movie 1 'whoa' and 4 'mehs' out of 10.