Prometheus

Prometheus was mindbendingly terrible.

Alien is held in high regard, and lots of people think Aliens is a great film. Then again, lots of people were thirteen years old once; that doesn't mean we should agree that a man titting about in a rubber suit is the pinnacle all culture should aspire to.

That's right, Aliens is not a brilliant film. Watch it now, in the cold light of day, your veins free of adolescent hormones, you'll have to agree. Why is there a spaceship the size of Manhattan transporting only ten marines across the galaxy? What's with the preposterous reproductive cycle of the alien? Why is the whole thing manifestly bollocks?

Ridley Scott has been at pains to emphasise that Prometheus is not part of the same storyline as Alien or Aliens. It just has the same sets, the same imagery, the same idiocy. It even has a bas-relief of an alien (no, I'm not going to call it a 'xenomorph' because I'm not a wanker) on a wall. And if it wasn't the same, the appearance of the Alien at the end would just be an extended 'up-yours' to the viewer. Which the preceding 120 minutes was, so that was redundant.

It's hard to know where to start. Idiocies of the plot keep flashing back, like some past trauma. Scientists who have to sprint to see an archaeological dig, because otherwise it might move. Noomi Rapace excavating a cave from a single cranny to a cavern in five minutes flat. Those stupid, stupid spacesuits that come with collar-mounted lights which can do nothing for your peripheral vision but maybe make you look like somebody's idea of cool. The blatant disregard for physics.

The whole plot requires everyone to be an idiot. That's the single largest problem. Unsympathetic, uncharacterised idiots straight from Central Casting.

Ok, the film starts by demonstrating that DNA strands are big enough to see, so scientific accuracy was never a high priority. But idiot scientists, desperate to remove their helmets when they find alien remains? A caesarian section where the patient is running around five minutes later, like she blew her nose and is right as rain? An alien that grows bigger and bigger and biggerer, just because the 'plot' needs it to, in a room where there's nothing for it to eat?

That's without mentioning the random zombie, trailing loose ends like a season of Lost, or the atrocious voiceover at the end (a call back to Blade Runner? An attempt to smear faeces in the faces of the audience?), or the wasting of so much acting talent, or the wierd mishmash of all the Alien films' components. You want jaded people getting a lecture? You got it. You want somebody poking around in things they don't understand? You got it. You want the space jockeys from Alien? You got it. You want to be on LV-223 rather than LV-436 so you can tell all the fanboys it's nothing to do with Alien, when you're recycling harder than a Greenpeace fundamentalist at the bottle bank? You got it.

Basically, imagine you're twelve years old again, and your big brother has been telling his friends about Aliens. This is the screenplay you'd write, with a crayon and a bottle of Sunny Delight. I never thought I'd see a film that would despoil my memory of Aliens Vs Predator, but this is that film. And I haven't even mentioned the crashing space ship, or Noomi Rapace's accent, or the smoking, or the way all the technology must have got worse between Prometheus and Alien, or, or, or ...

Just say no, ok. And I paid extra to see it in 3D too.