Sadly, Prometheus falls into the final category, a visually stunning, conceptually audacious, but ultimately an epic failure in terms of character, plot, and logic. I saw Prometheus in 2-D, and this is the only time I have regretted skipping the 3-D format. Scott used the frame with all the mastery of a visual master at the top of his form, some scenes I expect would have truly stunned me in 3-D, but they would have not saved this film. Continue with the review knowing that you will be spoiled.

The film starts, like that classic of SF cinema 2001:A Space Odyssey, in pre-history where a buff albino humanoid alien is disintegrating and spreading his genetic material into the environment. Unlike 2001 the filmmakers have no concept of how evolution works, seeming to think that this event would naturally lead to the development of human beings.

The film, again like 2001, skips to the 21^st century, but this time it is the late 21^st century and two archeologists discover cave paintings that indicated ancient humans worshiped and had contact with alien intelligences. Another jump forward in time, but just a few years, and we are now aboard the scientific exploration vessel Prometheus, with the android David, played to absolute perfection by Michael Fassbender, is maintaining the ship, studying intently a much better movie, Lawrence of Arabia, and awakening the crew upon arrival.

We learnt that this entire expedition has been funded, to the tune of 1 trillion dollars cue the Dr. Evil music, for the purpose of meeting the ‘engineers’ the alien who created us, the human race. The expedition’s biologist makes a token comment about discarding Darwinian evolution, and that is the last we hear of the amazing problems in trying to stipulate that mankind was crafted by alien hands.

Flying low and slow over a freaking planet, the easily find structures that are not natura, a process that should have taken days with computer assist, not hours with the good old fashioned mark 1 eyeball. Investigating the structure they find an alien corpse, minus a head due to an non-OSHA compliant hatch, and here we see just how little the scriptwriters understand scientists.  There is a biologist there, we have been told twice that this man is a biologist; a scientist dedicated to the study of life, how it works and how is started. Given the choice of staying with a scientific find of a lifetime, an alien lifeform with all the attendant biological questions that would pose and answer, our biologist elects to follows the geologist back to the ship. Throughout the rest of the film you can expect people to react and act just as intelligent and as competently. Naturally the two become fodder for alien lifeforms waiting for something to act as hosts, and because the scriptwriters felt that was not enough alien parasitical infections, the android David infects a crew member for reason I can not begin to fathom.

So we now have scenes of pain and screaming and flame throwers burning down character transformed into alien zombies. Because the parasitical worms are just like germs, viruses, and sperm,  our lead character become alien pregnant because she slept with a zombie-alien before full infect had set in. David, clearly with Ash-like programming that no one in the story would have writer, tries to put her back into hypersleep to preserve the alien, but being plucky and resourceful she escapes and uses an autodoc to perform self surgery through her abdominal wall and removes the alien baby.  Then with a stunning level of ignorance about the human body the script writers have our hero with her massive wound across her lower belly, running and jumping and being all action. Clearly these writers have never had their appendix out.

The alien/engineers reveal their stupid and violent nature and we are treated to heroic self-sacrifice to save mankind, This cause the round alien ship to crash and roll like a upturned hula-hoop, threatening to crush our two surviving humans, being written by idiots is not a survival trait and instead of running at a right angel to the hoopship of doom, our characters run directly away, along its path, just like those idiots who try to escape from cars by running down a flat straight road.

One is crushed the other survives because well the script writers say so, and with the head of the Android who killed so many, she goes off looking to the alien-engineers intent on asking them  why they are so mean.

Give this movie a wide berth. That sort of stupidity might be catching, like alien pregnancies.