The weakest film in the Alien series, and the weakest film on Ridley Scott's resume

Rating: 5/10 (26 June 2012)

By nature of its title alone, it's clear that Ridley Scott was intentionally trying to establish Prometheus as a stand-alone entity and steer us away from comparisons to the storied Alien franchise. However, since even casual viewers will know going in that the events in Prometheus are directly linked to that series, such comparisons are unavoidable, and a savvy director like Scott should have been aware enough of that to make sure that what we see in this film lines up with the mythology surrounding the discovery made by the Nostromo in 1979. Though Prometheus falters because it is a disappointing and simply average film as a whole, its biggest failure is that it does not serve as a logical introduction to the world of Alien, and as far as back-stories go, this one is murky and uneven at best.
The movie stalls right from the beginning, squandering nearly twenty minutes to show us events that are recapped in their entirety almost immediately afterward. The film doesn't begin in earnest until the crew of the Prometheus sets down on LV-223, and while our cohort of scientists' extended submersion into the planet's ancient catacombs is fairly tense and engrossing, it's also inevitably familiar for anyone who took the almost identical plunge with Cain, Dallas, and Lambert thirty-three years before.
The film is nearly half over before we finally begin to uncover any of the secrets of this expedition, and while our first exposure to the alien beings we expected when we signed for this mission provides a couple of much-needed jolts, the cause of this initial infestation requires us to accept that when two carefully trained and highly educated scientists encounter a bizarre, previously undiscovered species of monstrous, worm-like life forms, their initial hypothesis is that these slithering beasties who dwell in viscous pools of inky black sludge probably want to be petted. Predictably, this doesn't turn out very well for them.
Though this aspect of the plot should be a no-brainer since we're already wise to the ins and outs of these beings, the creatures in Prometheus are the most befuddling element of the film. Not only do these specimens bear almost no relation to their counterparts in the Alien installments, but their essence becomes utterly confusing and nonsensical when we discover what they truly are. While the previously-understood face-hugger begat chest-burster begat bipedal killing machine motif makes biological sense, the mutation of the aliens in Prometheus doesn't seem to adhere to any internal logic, and how these creepy-crawlies manifest changes from scene to scene and person to person. When encountering the matter which spawns the creatures, some characters swell up until their heads explode, one comes back as a powerful hyper-aggressive zombie, one finds herself impregnated with something that resembles an octopus, and one hatches an adolescent version of an Alien Queen.
More importantly, no one has anything burst out of their chest, which poses the pressing question: if this film is meant to explain what happened to the mummified pilot located by the crew of the Nostromo in the original Alien, why did he have a massive hole in his sternum when nothing remotely close to that is even suggested here? Purportedly, Scott's primary muse for this film is the origins of humanity, not the origins of Alien. Fair enough, and despite the often dicey quasi-mystical questions raised in this regard, that avenue is adequately explored here. However, since we ultimately don't get a resolution on that front either, I'm forced to pose another question: what exactly is the point of this movie? As a riddle, Prometheus isn't nearly as fun to puzzle over as it should be, and the intersecting sub-plots form such an incomprehensible web that I'm not quite sure if any portion of the story was resolved to my satisfaction.
I don't mean to suggest the film has no strengths, especially since it's pretty much impossible for a director with Scott's talents to put anything on the screen that isn't at least interesting to look at. There are some great technological innovations demonstrated here that were simply beyond the scope of 1979's visual effects capabilities, so Scott's imaginative addendums to the Nostromo's nuts and bolts are nifty to behold. But even these don't match up linearly with what we've seen before, and since every bit of machinery in this outing is so far advanced beyond the world of Alien, Prometheus seems to take place hundreds of years later, certainly not before. Worse, many of these gimmicks are just kind of there to be there (the film's android "reads dreams" by touching the crew members' cryo-pods, but this serves no ultimate purpose within the plot) and one toy is only utilized during the most cheesy and implausible scene in the film, when our leading lady essentially performs abdominal surgery on herself to remove an alien mass from her womb then immediately leaps off the operating table and runs down the hallway to rejoin the action.
The sets and locales are well-realized, and the acting is above-par (although Guy Pearce's old-age makeup is so clunky and unconvincing that he becomes a distraction whenever he's on the screen), but the characters themselves are mostly one-dimensional archetypes set up for easy disposal. There's really no one here to root for other than the creatures, which is a curious stance for Scott to take considering that this series introduced one of the most badass female heroines the screen has ever seen.
In the end, for all of its splendor and grandeur, Prometheus is essentially a glitzy B-movie, with all of the flaws and inconsistencies that designation entails. I'll still be the first one on board for a film that provides an exhilarating genesis for the scenario essayed to perfection in Alien, but this isn't anywhere close to being that film.