Sigh
5/10
Author: mark-southwell-385-725850 from United Kingdom
1 June 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Oh the hype. I cannot recall anticipating a movie so much. Matrix Reloaded may have come close, and the feeling of disappointment is all too familiar.

This is the first time I have been compelled to write a review on this site, mainly because most of my friends haven't seen it yet and I just have to vent my feelings somewhere. But before I begin that cathartic release let me say that this is no way a bad movie. I never once had the urge to walk out and I expect I will watch it again some months down the line. I don't feel the anger I experienced after Matrix 2 or Indy 4 but I certainly don't have the buzz of having just watched a truly great movie.

Lets start with the storyline. I think anyone going to watch this is fully aware by now that this is q prequel to Alien, and trust me, you'll have been slapped so hard in the face with this fact by the end of the film that your cheeks will be stinging. Time spent on plot background is over in a matter of seconds. If you've seen the trailers then you've pretty much seen the reason they're off to another planet.

From there the storyline follows the usual tried and tested Alien(s) method, i.e. They find stuff, it ain't good and people start dying. What's wrong with that? You cry. Nothing is wrong with that but from then on in in you can't help yourself comparing it to the other two films. And that's where the wheels start falling off.

The first two Alien movies were filled with strong characters who acted and behaved as you felt they should when their friends and colleagues start dying around them. In Prometheus however they may well have all been androids as Rapace apart, they were all taking death and destruction remarkably in their stride. Even one of the best scenes in the whole movie (Rapace's DIY Cesarean) is just glossed over like it didn't happen when .

She escapes quarantine, removes a baby squid from her stomach and then runs into the others covered in blood only to be mocked for lacking scientific fibre. Theron may just have well not been there for all she adds and will someone please tell me why they felt it necessary to employ Guy Pearce to play an old man? Here's an idea, just hire an old man to do it instead!

Even the characters taken as a whole are a rather strange bunch. In Alien they were a mining vessel (believable). In Aliens they took some hard asses because they were expecting trouble (believable). However on this occasion a billionaire thinks he'll take himself half way across the universe fully expecting to meet another civilisation who may or may not be hostile and who does he take with him? A couple of scientists, his daughter and a bunch of misfits. Oh but its OK, they have flamethrowers and a few pistols.

Moving on to the bad guys and here we have something which I thought was rather good, as an idea. The concept of humans having evolved from an alien race is a good one, and one of the more believable parts of the film. It was a good idea tackled well. Now if we'd just stayed with that idea and made a film about it I may have been a much happier man. However Scott had decided from the outset that this would be an alien prequel and we were subjected to this absurd notion that they were sinply created by a squid impregnating a super human.

Bingo! Quite why this hadn't already happened on the planet before is a mystery, as is why the Alien's don't come out looking more human every time one pops out of our stomachs. And so to the final scene which I suspect Scott saw in a ream one night and built an entire film around it. I can only compare it to Darth Vader's unavailing in Star Wars 3. Laughable.

As a rule I don't like prequels and sequels. They all too often lead to feelings of anger and dismay. But I thought if anyone is going to do it right it would be Ridley Scott. Alien was his baby and there's no way he'd make a mess of it. Well now I feel its time for a public appeal. Will somebody please make a decent ORIGINAL sci-fi movie. PLEASE!

You too, Ridley?
1/10
Author: yogsottoth (yogsottoth@hotmail.com) from Ankara, Turkey
3 June 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

SUCKED BIG TIME! The story was all over the place, most of the characters were completely unnecessary and underdeveloped, and there were no creatures to talk about really. I wasn't even tensed up for a second, let alone being scared.

Can you imagine a biologist guy, signed up for a mission to explore a different race, shitting his pants and literally leaving the scene at the first sight of an alien body that's been dead for 2000 years? Well, Ridley Scott could. However, the same guy goes ape schit over a real, moving alien cobra-thing and wants to cuddle her! Perfectly consistent character writing! And what the hell was that android guy trying to do with his plots and schemes? What was your plan? Who actually did you serve?

And Shaw who did nothing to fill in Ripley's shoes... She attacks the crew, performs a surgery -I'm not even gonna touch that one- that probably overthrows a plan in motion, comes out covered in blood and no one even says "Hey! What the heck?" and they go on another expedition together? And what was that space jockey's problem!? Relax, dude!! I mean you have to be a really mean bastard, consumed with rage to come out of a crashed ship and go after a woman you missed the chance to beat up before.

The final suicide mission could easily be completed with 1 guy. I will never understand what Shaw hoped to achieve by going after "our creators" to "find the answers". What answer are you gonna find with a beheaded android by your side from a race that clearly thrives on rage and hostility? And finally, this was the most UNNECESSARY use of Guy Pearce ever in a movie. Making fun of a Ridley Scott movie... Wow, I thought THAT would never happen.

It's like they deliberately screwed up the science
4/10
Author: Norman Cook from Orange County, California
17 June 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I can forgive the unanswered questions about the motives and biology of the aliens in Prometheus. After all, they're aliens! What I can't forgive is the awful, awful protocols shown by the human scientists, technicians, and spaceship crew throughout the movie.

To begin with, a legitimate scientific expedition would have started by releasing weather and observation satellites to orbit the planetoid for weeks, perhaps months before Prometheus ever landed. This would determine the most likely places to hunt for aliens, rather than just luckily finding alien structures. Then, the small, remote-controlled probes would be sent into the alien installations to map them thoroughly and take air and soil samples.

When pictures of the dead aliens came back, the scientist would spend many hours determining likely scenarios and procedures to avoid a similar fate before setting a foot inside.The biggest mistake the movie makes,though, is something I haven't seen discussed anywhere. People have written about the folly of the crew taking off their space suit helmets without checking for microbes or other contaminants. It's not just the air quality that could cause illness or injury.

What hasn't been mentioned is the danger of the humans contaminating the alien environment. Good scientists are concerned to the point of paranoia about destroying a pristine environment and invalidating their results. This is why Mars rovers are sterilized before they leave Earth. Once an alien planet is contaminated, there's no way to know what's alien and what's not. The crew of Prometheus would have to undergo rigorous decontamination procedures both when exiting the ship and on their return.

Another question that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere is why would an expedition as well-financed and equipped as Prometheus not have more than one robot? Weyland would want to have as much redundancy as possible to maximize success. Moreover, the humans would need to be cross trained, just as astronauts are now, so that in case of injury or illness there would be someone to fill in the gaps. This goes for the scientists, flight crew, security, and every other function.

Wouldn't Prometheus be crewed with the absolute best people in every role? People who knew what the mission was and who had trained together for months before leaving Earth. There is no excuse for second-best in a first-contact mission that's exploring a dangerous alien world. It's one thing to have a haunted-house movie filled with naïve teenagers, but it's quite another to see supposed top scientists do dumb things.

With a little more thought, Prometheus could have addressed the plot holes I and others have noted, and as a result been a tighter film with more tension and surprises.

Good special effects, poor, poor writing
6/10
Author: Michal Dudek from Manchester, England
3 June 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I must admit that the special effects and overall scale of the film is epic. But for crying out loud the plot is thin as paper and the writing is very very bad. None of the characters are acting in a logical way. There is no explainable motivations behind their actions and the story behind the alien race contradicts itself.

After watching it I have a feeling it's just a collection of cool ideas put together without any logic to link them. The film pretends to raise some philosophical questions but it's done in a very childish way and in the end you can "choose to believe" whatever you want despite the evidence to the contrary.

**************************SPOILER*****************************

They come to this alien planet (not Alien alien, just extraterrestrial) and decide to land immediately without any surveillance from the orbit. Luckily out of the whole planet the place they happened to fly over had alien structures so they land there. Only then the scientists learn from the mission director what they are allowed to do. They go to this alien structure with their hi-tech equipment and an android. The android presses all the buttons he can find like 5 year old and nobody's surprised that he doesn't explain anything.

Apparently he mastered a couple of ancient earth languages but that's no explanation to why he understands alien writings. The guy operating the hi-tech probes that map the structure suddenly flips out when he sees an alien corpse while everyone else is cool, decides to go back to the ship and gets lost in the tunnels. In the structure they decide that the air is breathable on the basis of it's chemical composition and take off their helmets.

Who in their right mind exposes oneself to an alien environment. You don't know what can be in this air especially that you're looking for alien life. Then out of nowhere a sand storm appears as if triggered by their actions. So they retreat and they take the alien head with them to the ship while the geo-expert most competent on finding his way back gets lost in the structure. In the ship they do decontamination of the alien head but they fail to decontaminate their own heads after the exposure to the alien environment.

And now the best happens: The paleontologist/archaeologist suddenly becomes an expert on alien physiology and just by looking at the head decides that there are some new cell outgrowths on the forehead. They decide to reanimate a 2000(?) year old head by using electroshocks after which the head explodes. (What was the point of that scene? To show their incompetence?) Then they examine the alien DNA under the microscope(!) and the analysis tells them it matches human DNA. (Wow really? After millions of years of evolution of human species it's still the same?

Oh wait, you can "choose to believe" so. Yet the opening scene of the alien committing suicide and dispersing in the water with cool particle effects suggests that he initiated all the life on the planet. But then again the ancient cultures worshipped the solar system the alien structures were on. So maybe we are their direct descendants. But it's not where the alien race comes from. It's just a storage place for biological weapon. Why would the aliens leave an "invitation" to their military base?) Meanwhile the android opens one of the vases they found in the structure like he knew exactly what he's doing. All in his room without any secure containment.

He brakes open a vial of unidentified liquid which for all he knows could be kryptonite or cool-aid and decides to roofie one of the scientist with it. Meanwhile the guys that were afraid of the alien corpse and got lost in the structure decide to make friends with a snakelike life form that emerged from a puddle and get raped by it. The roofied scientist gets sick but before that he manages to have sex with his colleague (Elizabeth) and impregnate her with an alien life form.

Then the android scans the Elizabeth on the next day like he knew what he was looking for and tries to restrain her so she will give birth to an alien. (Why would he want to do that???) She escapes and uses automated surgical chamber to remove the alien from her belly. The procedure cuts through her whole abdomen and then staples it back together. From now on she runs around in all action scenes with her severed abdominal muscles. (The least they could do is show some hi-tech quick healing procedure or something.)

She escapes and finds Wayland to be on the ship and he's looking for cure to old age. No one is surprised she has a gushing wound across her abdomen and they embark on another trip to the alien structure which turned out to be a spaceship. They revive one of the alien crew members which goes on a killing rampage after a chat with the android (no explanation why) and decides to fly the spaceship to eradicate life on earth. Fortunately after a quick chat with the female protagonist the pilots enthusiastically decide to go kamikaze on the alien spaceship and die with smiles on their faces.

Then there is the nerve wrecking scene of the doughnut spaceship rolling and chasing Elizabeth and Meredith in a straight line when all they had to do to avoid it was to step aside. The alien pilot somehow survives the crash and comes back with a revenge on his mind. It is defeated by the foetus Elizabeth gave birth to which grew to a gigantic size on absolutely nothing in a matter of hours closed in the operation chamber.

In the end Elizabeth joins forces with the android who poisoned her lover and tried to kill her as well and they fly off to find the home planet of the alien race.