You want to know why I say that? Then I'll get off the fence, because as others have said, when you sleep on this film, you don't wake up thinking any kinder of it. I certainly did want those other ideas to come across and for it to be about that. I wanted it to be a 'First Contact' film. I wanted to know who the jockey/engineer/creators were. However, we learned nothing about their motives. You say the plot was "convoluted". You are being very kind. The plot was full of holes and practically unfathomable.
You have surmised all of what you say about the jockey/engineer/creators; really the film just left lots more questions unanswered, and those answers it did present, I think we have shown already, made little sense. We aren't even sure if some of what the humans said was true or just their own assumptions.
Take away that and what remains is a ship investigating a planet where there are creatures that grow inside us and burst out of our chests. After the release of
Alien in 1979, it literally spawned another film with this same theme every month. It is a tired old concept now.
Alien was a classic 'horror'. The creature was largely unknown and unseen until later in the film. The story was shocking for its sexual themes and the chest bursting (which even the actors didn't know about until filming.)
Dan O'Bannon from
http://www.cracked.com/article_18932_alien-film-franchise-based-entirely-rape.html
Didn't this film just try to go one step further with that abortion?
Only now we already know all about the alien life cycle, and almost everything else about it, so no suspense there at all, just the shock factor remains. That is what all horror films have now become; blood gushing and explicit gore. Nothing is left to the imagination; there is no suspense.
Even the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation was done better in the earlier films - consistently portrayed as exhibiting the worst aspects of company profiteering and corporate greed; quite willing to sacrifice decency and human life for the pursuit of profit.
Here we had that exchanged instead for a vain old man suffering the depredations of ageing and looking for the secret of eternal life from his maker. All a part of this new religious theme that was introduced from nowhere.
I do think the sign of a good film is one that can be talked about for a long time after, but that should be for the right reasons. As I see it, most discussions here at Chronicles (after the liked it-didn't like it) start with nit picking the plot and the bad science, then they move on to the characters motives and 'mechanics' of the plot (as in which level they were on in
Inception). The films people discuss for ever (such as the
Matrix and
Bladerunner) then focus mostly on the symbolism contained within, together with the questions they pose about our own morality and future.
If we are still discussing the 'mechanics' of the plot here then I agree it can not have been very well plotted. (And I also find the religious symbolism in this film lazy. Even the
Da Vinci Code did a better job.)
PS: Some questions that also bothered me:
1. If the, "I'm a F***ing Geologist and I like Rocks" guy, and "I'm a Biologist" who pets extra-terrestrial creatures guy, really stayed behind, and they didn't take that huge, enormous, six-wheeled truck, back to Prometheus, where did the truck go to instead? Who took it?
2. Do people still listen to Stephen Stills eighty years from now? And would his Accordion be something someone would really take on a long space voyage?
And I've been reading some of the links here now. It seems that the ambiguity of Vickers being an Android was deliberate. Hence, her super-human strength, and yet everything else pointing to her humanity. It is a subject close to Ridley Scott's heart, which begs the question even more of why he didn't do the
Bladerunner sequel instead, and why tie this film to the
Alien universe at all, and not just do a completely different film which would not have had as many problems.
From interviews with Ridley Scott, most of what has been surmised about a 'Jesus Engineer' visiting Earth 2000 years ago is all intended. My problem is that none of that is in this film. I don't want to have read interviews with the Director, to read the things he forgot to put in, to understand the film.
Many people with questions about the Big Giant Head too. One person said it was a crossover to
Third Rock From the Sun leaving the possibility of William Shatner being in the sequel.
I'd failed to mention what a visual feast this was, but that's because I need more than that in a film. The cinematography, the design, all of that was good. I didn't watch in 3D, but I expect that even the very, very beginning (the shots of the glaciers and mountains, lakes and streams) would have been 100% better than the other 3D films I have seen. Still, if I wanted that I'd watch David Attenborough.
