Prometheus

I caught Ridley Scott's Alien "prequel" at work the other day and had very mixed feelings about it. First, the positive.

The film looks as incredible as you'd expect. It manages to take the visual aesthetic of the 1979 film and update it with today's technology while still keeping true to that world. The sets (including a faithful recreation of the space jockey stage), costumes (Charlize Theron looks mighty fine) and CGI are all worthy of Oscar nominations.
Noomi Rapace makes an effective Ripley-like heroine and Michael Fassbender is even better as the ship's android David. He manages to give depth to a character without emotions - not an easy task.
The score is good (including hints of Jerry Goldsmith's music from the original) though the more uplifting parts sound out of place.
There are a couple of genuinely creepy scenes, including an emergency caesarian sequence that will have any viewer squirming in their seat.
The film raises lots of interesting questions that aren't normally addressed in modern sci-fi movies. Which leads us to the bad.

Like Lost (which Damon Lindelof was also a writer on) the screenplay barely answers any of the questions it brings up, and poses new ones at the end. That's bad enough for a TV show, but is even worse for a movie which should feel complete, not like a TV pilot. I gave up counting the number of plot holes and illogical character actions.
The supporting actors are all stuck playing idiotic and mostly unlikeable characters. None of them are as memorable as the crew of the Nostromo in Alien. This is especially apparent at the end when two characters we barely know sacrifice themselves and we're supposed to care because they joke about some bet between them that most people have probably already forgotten.
The contrast between the Ancient Astronaut plot and the standard horror elements is jarring and doesn't really work at all. It would be like watching Mission to Mars and one of the god-like aliens suddenly turns into Michael Myers.
The mystery of the space jockeys and the aliens themselves is completely removed. While it's not necessarily a bad thing to reveal the jockeys are pasty-faced bald men in bio-mechanical suits and the alien xenomorphs are simply a form of germ warfare, it does make the universe a little smaller and less interesting. What makes it worse is that the supposedly fanboy pleasing ending doesn't even make it clear if we are witnessing the birth of the first alien or just a new strain. And since we're not even on the same planet as in Alien, the explanation for how the engineers crash another ship with another cargo of eggs on another planet is obviously one of the many things being saved for the hoped for sequels.

While that may sound overly negative, this isn't a bad film. It's entertaining, stylish and worth talking about. But Ridley Scott's return to the genre he redefined with Alien and Blade Runner is ultimately undone by a weak script. A disappointment, but at least it had more ambition than most blockbusters.