Prometheus

I have to be honest. Look, I'm a Ridley Scott fanboy. I freely admit that. And I had an overwhelming experience from the visuals on display. The natural landscapes of the beginning are mouth-agape stunning. Earth has its beauty. The ship is all I could possibly dream of seeing on a big screen. The ship's interior, the set decoration, the controls, the environmental suits the crew wears. The interior of the "cave" once our Prometheus crew land on the moon where tribal paintings depict the place where our creators (the "engineers" as they are called) supposedly live, the "hidden part" where the giant statue head is located with the "vases" storing *them*, the alien attack scenes, and especially the "C-section" scene, all provide a very worthwhile theatrical experience.

That said, I thought Charlize Theron's character, the "leader" of the ship, was terrible..no, worse, dreadfully written. She's a bitch. Let me say something here, I'm tired of Theron. I'm tired of looking at her. I watched her on Conan O'Brien one night and she's flat colorless. A beautiful woman, and that is all I see. Once, just once, I would like her to portray a character I can actually embrace emotionally. Eye candy. Sure, she is. In this film, she works for Wesley Enterprises, the company who funded the space trip, a trillion dollars worth, and it appears Theron wants the mission to be a miserable failure. She has a vessel that is all hers if something terrible happens to the Prometheus, designed specifically for her escape. It seems she wants to get the mission over with and go home.

The characters (especially Theron) make birdbrain mistakes that left me scratching my head. Why leave the team for the ship if you don't know what direction to go? Why go near an undocumented alien lifeform that looks positively dangerous? Why use an escape pod while the ship is still on land? Why let a missing crew member on board before making damn sure he wasn't a danger to everyone involved? He had been gone for a while, yet you let down the door to allow him in, placing everyone in peril.

Scott was going for something epic here. You can see he really wanted to challenge other films in his resume for supremacy as an iconic film in sci-fi. I think from that point of view he failed.

However, I thought Michael Fassbinder's android, David, was really neat. I could never quite figure him out, though. He has this sinister aura. David does place an alien "drop" in a crew member's drink as an experiment to see how he would evolve. He also whimsically informs Noomi Rapace that she is pregnant with some sort of alien-human hybrid monster (that turns out to look like a small octopus, ewww), injecting her with a knock-out drug to keep her still. He is a product of his programming, created by a master with specific instructions.
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4/6/2016
I was quite critical of Theron in this film, and years later she's just incredible in Mad Max: Fury Road. I might have been a bit tough on the film's plot flaws, but it was breathtaking in that theater. Scott filled the screen with whopping sci-fi splendor.