A Less Than Triumphant Return to Sci-Fi for Ridley Scott

Rating: 4/10 (8 June 2012)

For all the visual sci-fi and spectacle, I still can't overlook the muddled screenplay of "Prometheus" that handles it's epic journey in which humans discover the link to their evolution like a child with Attention Deficit Disorder.
As to be expected, this return to sci-fi from Ridley Scott, the man who brought us the first "Alien" film and "Blade Runner", "Prometheus" is a great looking film; but it's as if Scott story boarded this entire film using the covers of every pulp novel and magazine from the 50's to the 70's without bothering to figure out if it resulted in a cohesive film. The film wants to be too many things, and ends up being about nothing at all: no sooner does it latch on to something engaging or coherent, then it quickly abandons it for something else.
There was a lot of potential for this film: rather than show us the old alien that we have seen bursting from chests and terrorizing through space in the previous four films of the franchise, Ridley wants to explore all the other unseen horrors lurking on the ship the Nostromo crew stumbled across in the first film. But since Ridley hasn't made a sci-fi film in thirty years, it seems he can't decide whether or not he wants to make a horror film, an action epic, or a Kubrickian thinking-man's film about man's evolution; so he throws everything together and then moves on to something else when he gets bored.
It gives me no pleasure to berate this film: the first "Alien" film was a brilliantly constructed horror masterpiece of the highest calibre, and his following film, "Blade Runner" is one of the most visually-stunning films of all time. So, it was with great hope that I expected Ridley Scott to come riding back into the sci-fi genre on a white horse like Maximus in "Gladiator" and give us another landmark film. Instead, he has finally planted the final nail in the coffin of the franchise that launched him to prominence and stardom.