Great looks, no brain

Rating: 5/10 (11 June 2012)

Prometheus is more disappointing than it would have been had it not been an Alien prequel directed by Ridley Scott himself, because it raised expectations so much higher.
There's nothing to fault in the areas where Scott is famous for excelling - cinematography, lighting, production design, the overall look and 'feel' of the worlds he's created. It's magnificent to watch. The problem comes when you start to engage the spongy thing *behind* your eyes, because the script is garbage.
It became clear that the writer (Lost's Damon Lindelof) wasn't paying attention very early on, when a character says the ship's journey took (paraphrasing) "Two years, three months, five days, thirty-six hours." Did we change to metric time in the future? Don't you mean "six days, twelve hours"? And from that point on, it becomes clear that nobody cared about the story making sense.
You'd think that the people hired for a trillion-dollar mission would be the best of the best, but instead we get: an archaeologist who becomes almost suicidally depressed when he finds out that the aliens are long dead (if he wanted to meet other cultures when they were alive, maybe he should have become an anthropologist); a biologist who interprets a snake-like creature hissing, rearing up and baring its fangs as a sign of friendship; a guy in charge of mapping the site who gets lost (despite having a PDA on his arm showing the map!); a captain who abandons his post and leaves two of his charges alone in a hostile environment while he goes and has sex with his boss; and a supposedly deeply Christian person who somehow reconciles the Bible with "God is a space alien who wants us to come visit his home planet!" based on nothing more than ambiguous cave paintings. Add to that scientists who don't realise that just because air is breathable doesn't mean it's safe to do so (and then make a point of sniffing alien corpses and ignoring quarantine procedures), pilots who accept kamikaze suicide with a bored shrug, and someone who can only run in a straight line across an open plain even with a giant bagel rolling after her, and there is only one conclusion: these people are morons.
Because all the characters are stupid, inconsistent and/or cardboard, it's impossible to care about them. (Ironically, the only interesting character is a robot.) And if you don't care about them, why should you care about anything they experience? Not that it matters, because nothing they do experience makes sense. Take the black goo: it variously breaks down living tissue into dust within moments, turns worms into giant snakes, mutates people into contortionist zombies, makes tendrils pop out of people's eyes, impregnates women with squids and causes fully-grown not-quite-Xenomorphs to burst from "alien" (well, 100% human according to their DNA, despite their being blue, ten feet tall and having totally black eyes) bodies. It's not a mystery to blow the audience's mind; it's just a random MacGuffin to provide another squicky scene.
And that's the film's problem. It claims to be (and may even think it is) profound and mysterious and deep with mythic resonance, when it's really schlock with ideas above its station. It's one hour and 63 minutes of gorgeous disappointment.