When is a prequel not a prequel?

Rating: 5/10 (7 November 2012)

I saw the Blu-Ray of this. I was planning on catching it in a movie theater at some point but missed out and, having now watched it on Blu-Ray, I'm glad I didn't waste the cost of a cinema ticket.
The whole idea of this movie intrigued me, Ridley Scott stating in interviews that it's not a prequel, it's an original movie that references Alien. Being a fan of Alien & Aliens I was intrigued as to what that meant.
Having now watched the movie I now know what he meant was that it is a prequel, but it's so bad I'm going to try and distance it from Alien because I screwed it up and I don't want people to associate it with the Alien franchise because they will lynch me.
It's not original because it's virtually Alien without the Aliens. All of the references to Alien are clearly there but what they do is completely screw up the Alien mythology as it originally stood and if you were to watch Alien now everything you loved about it would make no sense because the prequel that isn't a prequel has destroyed any of the concepts and understanding of Alien and the Aliens in it.
Naomi Rapaces character is Ripley from Alien in a different guise. A strong woman who is not trained to be a leader or killer but who ends up leading everyone else and killing the alien baddie in the movie and, just like Alien, the ending takes place in the escape pod. Hell, even though she's just a scientist, she decides at the end of the move to not return to earth but instead to fly off and go and take on the entire race of the 'human engineers' who created the Aliens to begin with, all on her own with a broken headless robot at her side. The robot is played by Michael Fassbender, and is a direct copy of Ash in Alien, even down to having his head torn off at the end.
Idris Elba's character is a copy of Dallas in Alien, and all of the crew members are copies of all the other crew members in Alien (i.e. the ones who get picked off one by one in Alien). Crew members get inseminated via aliens in metal pods rather than seed pods in Alien, and then something grows inside of them, just like Alien, but it doesn't look like the alien in Alien. See how this movie is original so far?
What Charlie Theron's characters point is I don't know. She doesn't do anything, is hardly in any scenes, and then gets killed. Weyland also appears in this prequel that's not a prequel, but is a completely different looking and sounding Weyland to the Weyland in all the other Alien and indeed Alien vs. Predator movies. How does that work? Why make all the other characters copies of characters in Alien but make Weyland, who appears in all the other Alien movies, different?
This whole movie is bizarre, and it's no wonder if you have a director claim it's original when the story is virtually the same as Alien, with characters poor copies of the characters in Alien. The action scenes are poor, there is nothing scary about the movie, the acting is poor and the accents even poorer (Rapace is Swedish but plays an English woman, Elba is English but plays an American - and both can't do their respective accents properly).
If you wanted to make an original movie make an original movie. If you want to do a prequel to Alien do a prequel, but one thing you can't and shouldn't do is try to do both in one movie. Ridley has quite literally done a Lucas, and completely screwed over an entire franchise to make some money. If this movie was the first in the Alien franchise there never would have been an Alien, because this is so poor no one would want to see anything more. Because it's so poor Alien now makes no sense if this is indeed it's prequel.
If you like Alien and want to keep those good memories of Alien never, ever, ever see this movie. It destroys the Alien franchise.