I saw it today. I mostly echo what has been said above.
[spoiler]One of the things where Ridley Scott is great is metaphors. They were plenty and extremely well elaborated in the first Alien (penis shaped aliens, "universal rapes", and a lot of deliberate choices in the screenplay, etc). There is a sequence in Prometheus where Shaws husband comes into her room and starts to speak to her about the engineers and life creation, then while doing so he steps right into the hologram of one of the engineers, and takes exactly his place while he continues to speak. They are plenty of other ones like this.
On the good things the screenplay is great (well, thats Ridley Scott), especially at the beginning before landing on the planet, and the movie looks good (big budgets and all...). Interesting questions and concepts are shown.
On the weird and/or bad things, I may have a lot to say :
- The sheer stupidity of the crew, as said above. Wtf ? Humanity can create pretty accurate and believable human cyber replicas, and they can not even create the simplest robot ? They have to send a whole team of humans direction into that tomb ? Come on, it is not 1969 anymore. NASA sends robots everywhere on the solar system firstly because its less costly, and a lot easier to do, but also, where risks are obivous like that you send automated vehicules. Seriously, they have never heard of probes ? They really had to come into that wreck to drop these little scanning spheres ? They never heard of "security protocols" ? Every second of that movie makes it sound very little believable considering at each moment they just do stupid unsafe things.
- What was the purpose of that movie ? To expand on the Alien universe and lore a little ? Well ok, it brought some interesting concepts, logical explanations and concerns, but didn't it break a little the whole atmosphere and mysticism around the aliens ? These engineers look pitiful, btw. Welcome back to die again, musculous lord Voldemort. But this time, raped in the throat, yarr.
- Plot holes and stretched things. As already stated above several times, I do not have much to add.
- What the heck was that zombie ? That was so alien... to the alien concept that I wondered if it was something related to the aliens. Why the hell does he starts to kill everybody, while everybody is actually walking, living compatible meat for alien reproduction ?
- I hate that obnoxious hollywoodish christian morality. Nobody noticed that all the atheists died when the only survivor were two believers ? Yes two believers, even David believes in creators, except he knows who are his creators and ends up to start to believe in Shaw's ideals. Shaw's husband continuously talks about pragmatic things where he says everyone can create life, they humans are already gods, etc. He dies. The engineers are depicted as gods, but actually only pretending to be. They die. Shaw tells that even if they have found their creators, she still believes in something greater that created them (God ?). I would not have minded if she had not that damn rood around her neck. This is christian. It is an obvious link to religion. Vickers only try to flee when the captain and the last men of the crew suddenly decide to suicide gank the engineer ship. She dies, the coward she is. Ofc Shaw starts to think to retaliation at the very end and think about a whole genocide, but thats not a big deal heh, since these engineers are not really human ? I may have seen something that isnt really in the movie, but well...
- Edit : also I forgot to add the fact that Ridley Scott pulls the exact same strings on the scripts and the story he used in Alien (ex : the poor dude(s) a little stupid that meet the real alien first and an unfortunate end, the people that comes back infected from the wreck in the ship, the betraying android, etc etc). If you have seen the first Alien, then you have pretty much seen Prometheus. That's a bit a shame imo, he could have invented some new things.
That said, I find it a good movie still, that was still enjoyable.[/spoiler]
