I expected much, much more

Rating: 4/10 (14 April 2014)

Given the qualifications of the director and the size of the budget I expected a fantastic piece of scifi, right up there with Alien. What I got was a farce.
Lets get the praise out of the way. It's visually brilliant. As good as it gets even and the reason for 4/10 rather than lower.
Now to the crux of it's failure - the script. There is one failure after another in it. The script has been written by the most "Hollywoodised" (sic) team I've ever come across and that's NOT a compliment. There is one cliché after another and one moment of total and utter disbelief after another: entering a planetary atmosphere just a couple of miles from where they want to be by pure chance, man with satnav gets lost, removal of helmets in unknown atmosphere, treating unknown alien as automatically friendly, major operation and immediately mobile etc etc etc. The list is frighteningly long so I'll not list all the moments of failure. These "Hollywood moments" as I'll call them utterly ruin the film with there voracious tenacity to continually test your intelligence. Scifi requires a certain suspension of reality in many cases to produce a film at all. That suspension of reality works only if it's plausible. This film though, takes reality and sticks it's middle finger up at it. When you throw away any semblance of reality what you have is suitable for animation only. Unfortunately real live actors were subjected to this script. They did a decent job in as far as the script allowed but it couldn't have been harder for them if there'd been a custard pie throwing contest in the middle of the film too. This was more Keystone Kops than Alien.
Prometheus could and should have been a magnificent film. The hard bits were done superbly. How they could have got such a basic as the script so badly wrong is beyond comprehension. How a talented team failed to see such a poor script was in use is also beyond me.
I note that Prometheus 2 is listed on IMDb as a 2016 release. I earnestly hope that a different team is chosen to write it. Films that insult your intelligence will always fall flat.