I think at core film is a visual medium, though as a writer story is most important to me. Still, Alien itself is a prime case of a script being stripped down to the bare minimum of character, and it's all visuals, mood, cutting, music and performance. If anything proves the role of the director, it is Alien. On the page, it is cold, dry and potentially good, but nowhere near what it is on film.
Prometheus's story is, I think, seen as goofy to a hardened fanbase that has seen everything and thought up everything. I don't think it's without cinematic cliches, like the crew sacrificing themselves, but that's also time-honored stuff which I bought here - Janek and his men are ex-military and have seen the horrors of the Engineers, and are shown throughout to be both appalled by the developments and committed to each other. There's really no more or less character to them and their decisions than, say, a Gorman in Aliens or, well, basically anyone in Alien 3.
As for Avatar, yeah, people mocked that too. But it was a monster hit. Most of the Internet thought it would flop and be Heaven's Gate for the digital age; I certainly did. But it turned out, when the public saw it, to be a very old, classic film story, a Western and a romance, told in a fresh, new and exciting way. It was riddled with cliches and old hat stuff, but it works because of how it's executed. So many films are like that.
