1.Ridley wants to scare the living sh*t out of the audienceI will start off with this, a more obvious aspect of the movie - the horror elements.
Spoiler
Prometheus is not scary. I will say that from the very beginning.
It has disturbing scenes, but I did not feel terrified, more like disturbed of what I was seeing. There was only one jump-scare moment that that was at the very end with the squidhugger.
There is a nice moment when zombie Fifield wakes up from that scary position and attacks. But the following fight is neither scary nor disturbing, mostly because I don't even know the names of the people being killed. And there isn't even any gore. The makeup was good, but it wasn't showed too much and that made the scene less interesting. In fact I was more curious about what was going to happen to zombie Fifield than the nameless redshirts being thrown around.
There was no dark corridor crawling, no dark corridors to begin with. And that is a trademark of the Alien franchise. Even the first AvP was darker than this.
However I did enjoy it as a whole, as the references and connections to the Alien franchise do make it more terrifying than it really is.
2.There is little sense of progressionHere I will have to go all-spoiler tags unfortunately.
Spoiler
Usually a movie changes sets as the story moves on. It gives a sense of progression alongside the new events that take place.
In Prometheus the story moves on, but there is little sense of progression mostly because the lack of scenery changes.
Allow me to elaborate:
So they are on the Prometheus when they land.
Then they go in the pyramid/ship for the first time and explore.
Then they are back on Prometheus with the severed head.
Then they go back in search for the lost crewmen.
Then they are back on Prometheus, where the infected guy gets incinerated.
Then they go back on the alien ship because Weyland says so.
Then we are inside the escape pod where the giant squidhugger shows the engineer some love.
Then Shaw goes back on the crashed ship and takes David with her.
There is way too much going back and forth in this movie and after the 2nd time they go on the engineer ship it becomes boring and uninteresting. At least in the other movies they picked a main set and stuck with it for 80% of the movie time, but here they instead chose to use the only two sets: Prometheus and Enginner ship and go back and forth, back and forth, baaack aaand fooorth...
I honestly am becoming allergic to everything in the future having holograms and movies abusing this technology, which in my opinion is far more impractical than a normal display touch screen.
Spoiler
First of all we have talking holograms who teach David how to speak in ancient languages. Question: what is the purpose of having a hologram? Couldn't a simple voice interaction program be a lot more practical and less resource consuming?
Then we have the holographic Power Point Presentation (or the .HPPT file format). Again, wouldn't a simple projection on a wall be easier to understand? They're just floating pictures for God's sake!
Weyland in his home I can understand, because it is an interactive hologram. But a simple video would have sufficed here too.
Then we have every screen on board the ship as a hologram.
Holographic technology as it is depicted in most "new age" sci-fi movies is very confusing and apparently difficult to operate. Holographic screens have no background (it is transparent) making it harder to read and forcing the use of specific font colors in order to not get them confused. Because of that, you cannot project it while having a bright light (eg. a sun) in front since it becomes impossible to read.
The only practical application of a hologram in this movie is the mapping system with the floating balls with scanning lasers. That makes sense, because having a complete 3d virtual model of the scanned ship can be very, very useful.
Another hologram that bothered me was the pointless map room inside the engineer ship. Again, wouldn't a simple touch screen be more efficient and easy to operate rather than standing in the middle of the room and "grabbing" planets as they fly by?
I won't say that the holographic technology killed this movie for me, but it added too much unnecessary color and shiny stuff, in a movie that is supposed to be dark.
I am not one of those people who thinks that Prometheus should have retained the 100% retro technology from Alien.
However, in that movie Ridley tried to make technology plausible while looking both futuristic and practical for the 70's and even today.
4.Characters are stupid when the movie needs them to beSure, this is a common thing in movies, especially horror ones. There are only a few things I would like to point out, more obvious things.
Spoiler
So when the engineer wakes up and kills Weyland, someone takes a shot at it.
Why in every movie, characters wielding guns tend to aim at the body parts covered with armor, rather than exposed skin or organs?
In any event, this guy aims at the engineer's chest, covered with some sort of armor, while 3 shots in between his eyes would have been much more efficient. Aim for the head! Sure, it might not have killed it, but you wouldn't blame the poor guy for at least trying.
If the engineer was killed, then there was no need for the Prometheus to go all kamikaze on the Juggernaut.
Another obvious example of scheduled character stupidity was when Shaw and Vickers were running away from the spinning Juggernaut. It was a pointless scene, made specifically for 3D. But that is besides the point.
The ship was spinning like a coin, on the edge, so a simple running sideways would have saved them both. But instead they choose to run right in the direction of the spin. Vickers is caught and crushed under the weight of the ship. At the very last moment Shaw does the right thing and simply rolls to the right, completely avoiding the ship. See Vickers? It was that simple.
Prometheus fells more like a mixed bag, as it doesn't appear to have a particular story or genre focus.
Spoiler
In theory, a story about Gods and the evolution of humankind can be combined with horror elements to make it a horror movie. But both of these aspects are not entire explored to their full potential. The original Alien was a bit less pretentious when it came to the ideas.
Bottom line, it was a story about a monster with sharp teeth. But the execution was brilliant!
In Prometheus it is exactly the opposite. We have a complex origin story about the human spcies, with both religious and historical events being mentioned and linked together, but the execution somehow lacked pacing, consistency and...a soul.
It can't be clearly defined, as the story is blurry at best, with no clear focus on any of these aspects.
I also found the last scene of Shaw and David taking off in an engineer ship a bit overwhelming.
Prometheus fells too pretentious in the ideas it tries to expose, which are quite complex, but not explored long enough to give a sense of accomplishment and understanding in the end.
I appreciate the relatively slow build-up instead of throwing us right in the action. That was good.
I do not want you to get the wrong idea out of this post, that I disliked the movie.
On the contrary, I enjoyed it and on a scale I would place it between Alien3 and Resurrection, definitely not AvP material here.
But there are some things that bothered me. It was not the "to be continued" ending, it was not the creature design. It was the fact that it had potential, but they did not take full advantage of it.
