Doing Your Homework

Rating: 4/10 (29 September 2012)

(spoilers)Recently I watched Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" on a long haul flight, and was disappointed, especially when comparing it to the original masterpiece of the series, "Alien". I'm willing to let go some of the borrowing of original content, but here is an example of a movie where director, writers, and editors fail to tighten up dirt-poor script-writing and don't do a good job with the cast. I get tired of the over-trodden clichés where foolish characters behave ridiculously to suit the story - examples, the 2 engineers "playing" with an alien like it's a pet snake, or crew-members opening the outside doors of the ship with abandon. The whole crew besides the android was blase...you have supposed PHD's acting like nothing of the sort taking off their helmets in a foreign atmospheres, and mostly behaving and sounding like children. Charlize Theron's character was was way too obviously written in as the token antagonist - no subtleties or shading whatsoever - smack me in the face with plot-devices why don't you. The captain of the ship didn't stand for anything and was spineless. This was supposed to be an expert mission? On the other side of things, the many effects were generally outstanding although some of their alien concepts were blatantly ripped off from STTNG episode content (specifically "Time's Arrow" Multi-part episodes). So Scott and the troop of 4+ writers should know better (the more writers involved usually spells trouble). Correcting a lot of this laziness and doing your homework with the script may have turned things around - oh and to boot, the music and sound effects were mostly unremarkable and paled in comparison to the original as well. Disappointing.