But is there an interesting story to tell there? We have already seen "aliens run amok" numerous times now. It was fun the first couple of times, but that story has gotten a bit old, predictable and boring. I can't believe you would be more interested in just having more of the same shoveled in than something new and different that opens new possibilities and treads new ground. Love it or hate it, Prometheus didn't follow the same tired model that has become the standard for the aliens franchise.
Yes, there is an interesting story to tell. In fact, it could be very interesting if told well... and any story told well has characters - likeable or not - that are worth following through their exploits. Ripley in the first and second movie was not a very likeable character, but you believed her and what she did, as well as the other characters - at least in the first one. The second one went into broader more stereotypical strokes with some of the characters, but still kept pretty much within the realm of plausibility.
The third one... who should you care about? The rapist? The murderer? The violent criminal? The stupid and the arrogant caretakers of the prison facility? Ripley? Honestly... there's no one really left to root for and at least they had Ripley die this time.
The fourth one... they ****ing bring her back? NOOOOOOOO. Alien without Ripley would work just as well, perhaps better. She is not needed.
Regarding Prometheus. The quest to figure out who and what and why the Space Jockeys are and the payload on the ship that evolves into the xenomorph. Very clearly a weapon of some type or a ritualistic cleansing tool. Whoever could dream up such things must be a heck of a lot more complex than humans in their potential capacity for good and extreme cruelty.
As mentioned in my post there is very little reaction to the fact that they found alien life, so naturally, I'm assuming humankind has had other extra terrestrial life form encounters prior to Prometheus. Otherwise there would have been a bigger reaction to the find. That just opens up things a whole lot more. Who were those and what happened there and are they looking for the same answers... and is there with their discovery a competition and potential rivalry between them and humankind to possibly get to the creators to get the answers.
But leaving that possibility aside... the movie sets out to explore the who and the what and the why - were we created by intelligent extra terrestrial beings and why did they create us... and... who created them. It is an interesting story, if you can tell it, so that it seems plausible and relatable and where it feels worth following the characters in their search for answers. The best option is usually to have the audience experience things and learn things at the rate the characters learn them, so you are more inclined to care about the characters and feel as mystified and curious as they do, instead of constantly being ahead of them and hoping they'll eventually catch up... only to groan and bemoan that they sadly never do. It's like... we are either watching the events through the eyes of the emotionless android who doesn't understand or know human emotions, or we are seeing things through the perspective of the engineers and therefore, understandably, feel disappointment with the first encounter at the invitation point, with the kind of retarded people that was actually chosen to come meet them.
It's like CGI movies directing attention towards the effects, showing everything before the characters see them and experiencing them, instead of letting the characters do the exploring and slowly revealing the cool thing the CGI is there to represent - environment and creature/character. It's like knowing the killer in a crime novel, because it is spelled out in the first page. Then what's the point of the rest of the story?
If we hadn't seen the human shaped engineers in this one, but kept exclusively to the space jockey design... nearly everything else in the movie could still run as it did, but would add mystery. Instead of finding a preserved head inside the bio-helmet... they just find a skull... they speculate, they argue, they have ANY reaction... and it would still be a mystery. The one at the end, being a pilot fused to the seat, in suit... you still keep the mystery for a little while longer. Even with showing him out of the suit... it would be a surprise at that point, but that's ruined by showing them already at the beginning and in those holographic recordings that are just appropriately there and showing exactly the things needed to propel the very cliche type exposition. It cheapens things by showing things way too soon.
There's no real shock at any of the discoveries they make... no reaction, no heated arguments back and forth, no real caring - no natural human curiosity in trying to figure things out, like we do here in these discussions. We are having the discussions here that the characters in the movie should have had - ANY reaction at all.
All we get is absurdly stupid *let's pet the giant penis* and otherwise... *huh*.
It would be like having Vader say in the first five minutes of ANH that he was Anakin Skywalker and Luke and Leia are his kids. Then watching the rest of the movies as they are... and you shake your head at Obi-Wan telling tall tales, Luke's reaction in ESB... and pretty much killing that whole plot immediately. You don't want to be too ahead of the characters in the movie and what they know as an audience. That's just lazy and pointless storytelling.
