Hollywood Killed the Sci-Fi Star

Rating: 3/10 (6 June 2012)

I blame those no good Hollywood fat cat studio execs, sitting on their over paid pen pushing asses, for the state of film making these days. Let's face it, if this film wasn't part of the Alien franchise and had nothing to do with Ridley Scott it would not have been made. And for good reason.
Prometheus sucked balls. And sucked balls big time! While it is not the worst movie I have ever seen, I expected far better than this. It seemed to have all the right ingredients, but some how they cooked up a turd sandwich. I can't believe the amount of people who have given it a good review solely based on the fact that it looked good. And it did look great. The CGI was awesome and the use of real sets for once was a refreshing change from the endless amount of films that are totally filmed in front of a blue/green screen these days.
I am a huge fan of Alien and Aliens. This film deserved to be so much better. So low was my opinion of this film I thought that surely I had missed some vital plot device that would make everything fit into place. If anyone could explain to me these few points I would consider changing my mind.
Through out all the major civilizations that have existed on earth there are these records of a distant solar system that they used to "worship" or something. Why and how? Why did they worship this? If the aliens created life on earth and then abandoned us to evolve as we have done, how do the Inca's, Mayan's and the Egyptians know of them unless there had been direct contact between the aliens and these cultures. This sounds like the shaky explainings of the AVP movies!
OK OK. So these cultures some how knew of this distant solar system. Why did the aliens tell them? This planet (LV 223) is a WMD processing/storage facility. Why do we need to know of this place. Surely their home world would have been more suitable to finger paint on your cave wall.
So the Prometheus lands next to the alien structure and the gung ho bunch of experts, the best money can buy, proceed to break every scientific protocol in the book and somehow seem to be surprised when it starts to go wrong. Why did David poison Charlie with the alien goo? Why would he do that? Without knowing the difference between this super genetic material and a puddle of Jelli Baff why would he spike his drink with it? What was he expecting to happen, and based on what knowledge? And the guy dies horribly. What did he learn or gain from that, that he couldn't have learned through proper scientific research. It makes no sense.
How did the captain figure out that the whole planet was a WMD factory? I assume there is a scene or 2 that was cut from the film and was replaced with this one line and called it "plot development".
Why was there an "Engineer" in stasis in the first place. Why did he go into hibernation 2000+ years ago after all his friends died? And why did he, upon waking immediately decide he must wipe out Earth? He didn't even read his emails or a newspaper to catch up on what had happened in the thousands of years he'd been asleep. He just woke up and decided that genocide was the first order of the day.
I feel if I was to start talking about the characters I would exceed the word limit. They are just poorly thought out faces who you do not grow to love or care about. Fassbender was awesome as David, but that's it. The scientist couple, Elizabeth and Charlie were just annoying. Surely they can't fool Sci-Fi fans with these 2 jokers pretending to be scientists. I was glad when Charlie died and the thing they pulled out of Elizabeth was like a generic movie monster that didn't seem to have much imagination put into it at all. Not that it was relevant to anything.
Overall I think that someone had a good idea for this film, but them some studio executive came along and said "That sounds great. But what if." And the result was a mish mash of ideas that collectively doesn't make much sense. Ridley Scott said himself that they edited it to be a certificate 15 as "that can mean the difference of around $80M in box office takings". So in the end I think art had to make concessions for what is really important, making money, right Ridley?
Sci-Fi is dead. Hollywood killed it. Can anyone name me a truly great Sci-Fi film released in the last 10 years? Depending if you count super hero movies as Sci-Fi, there are one or 2 at best.