Prometheus ★☆☆☆☆ The Alien franchise sinks even lower still

This loathsome film is populated by daft, bland characters whose reactions to each other and to the epic, first alien contact situation never ring true. They are reckless and amateurish and set a whole new standard for fools rushing in. The film is jam-packed, start to finish, with rindonkulous, thoroughly mockable don’t-go-in-there idiocy. The characters are so dumb you want them to get chest-bursted. It’s a trillion-dollar exploratory expedition, we are told, but the crew seem to be entirely made up of unprofessional misfits; no one seems to know each other or why they are there until a brief orientation lecture upon arrival at another planet. No one even really asks any questions.

When the crew finds a few dead aliens, the “scientist” in charge jumps to the conclusion that they must all be dead (everywhere?) and is petulantly disappointed that he doesn’t get to “meet his maker.” He does not spend so much as a single line of dialogue speculating about the significance of anything they did find: fabulous artifacts, proof that we’re no alone in the universe, that sort of thing. He’s more concerned about his existential angst. Hey, Ridley: THAT’S NOT HOW SCIENTISTS REACT TO DISCOVERING ALIENS. The characer of Ash in Alien — an android! — had much more natural curiosity than these characters. And charisma. This movie lacked everything that made Alien great. It is actually as bad as Alien 4, if not worse. There’s so much more wrong … but without characters or chemistry, who cares?

Our audience (packed house) literally laughed at the final alien reveal… and not in a good way. It’s a grim sign indeed when people laugh at the ending of your supposedly scary and profound movie.

Yeah, definitely reach out to this. The snake-thing touch moment was possibly the greatest ever don’t-go-in-there moment in scary movie history.

I’d write more, but it’s not necessary, because the film has already been perfectly snarked at in detail by Henry Rothwell: Prometheus: an archaeological perspective (sort of).