The year is 2086. A group of archeologists discover that a certain star pattern keeps reappearing in cave paintings, stone tablets and other artifacts all over the earth throughout antiquity, dating back as far as 35,000 years. Since they know those different civilizations had no contact with each other, they must all have individually learned about this star pattern. As it turns out, the pattern isn’t even visible to the naked eye.

Now the film makes a giant leap forward. The pattern has been identified as a star cluster. It’s now the 2090s, and a human expedition is on its way to a distant star in that cluster. Humanity wants to know what is behind the secret. The crew members awake from cryogenic sleep of over two years just before they arrive at the destination planet and things quickly become complicated.

I love science fiction pictures with stunning scenery, exceptional special effects, ultra futuristic technology and interesting aliens. Prometheus has all of these attributes. But the positives stop there. The script and the story come across as silly at best, and the acting is terrible.

When the crew first wakes up from their cryogenic sleep, it quickly becomes obvious that the participants all have different agendas and there is no cohesion. I cannot imagine that Earth would send a crew to a distant star and the various members of the crew would not agree with each other on the objective of the mission, or even about basic things like the chain of command. A crew of misfits going on an offshore oil rig to work for a few weeks would be more cohesive than this crew of supposedly highly trained specialists on Earth’s first mission to another planet circling another star. The crew members are constantly bickering. Inane dialog permeates the movie. The behavior and motives of the crew are so unrealistic and unbelievable, they do nothing but distract.

The aliens are also just a mumbo-jumbo of life forms with no apparent cohesion. The dominant species looks like large, three-meter humans. As it turns out (spoiler alert) – the humans figure out that the DNA of the aliens is identical as that to humans, so the finding is that the aliens came to Earth eons ago and created humanity. Ah, we have something in common.

So why, if that’s the case, is the one alien left on the planet only interested in crushing the humans like beetles? Why does he rip their heads off? Why are the humans so careless on the alien world, checking out slithering, snake-like life forms with their bare hands, only to get devoured within seconds? And what’s with the squid-like aliens that seem to have no other purpose but to grow gigantic within the course of a single day so they can then hunt and eat everything else in their way? And why do the squids need humans to gestate in?

These aliens are supposedly older than humanity itself, yet the only thing they seem to be interested in is crushing humans. The whole movie seems like an excuse to show slimy, tentacle-laden and insectoid aliens killing people. And the supposedly highly trained humans don’t seem to learn from their early mistakes and they keep doing one stupid thing after another, until they are almost all gone.

One of the final scenes reveals that, guess what, Prometheus is a prequel to “Alien” and I found myself looking for Sigourney Weaver.

This could be an exciting movie about a starship trip to an alien world. If only the script had not been so stupid. What a waste of an opportunity.

Rating: *