[What Came Before]

I started getting angry when she opened a hole to a new cave painting and they were just shining lights on them and breathing on them. 35,000 years old and they're destroying them! agh. 

Then the stupidity continues, and they remove their helmets cause the gas mix is okay.  WTF?  the gas mix is fine, but what about all the potential pathogens in the air!  this oversight MIGHT make sense, except experts on cave paintings would realize just how damaged they could be or that their breath could be to this alien enviroment.  (naturally the paintings dissolve).  Then I just lost it when the BIOLOGIST, when confronted with the complete corpse of an extraterrestrial is the one that wants to leave, he's not interested at all in his own field.  why the fuck did they bring a biologist if not to have someone interested in this shit.

And then the autopsy is, 'let's zap their brain with electricity and see what happens'  and they explode the only known extant xeno brain oh well.

the moronic level of stuff in the scientists is just so frustrating, it's possible this could have once been an interesting idea, but this is just really stupid in how it wound up.  If this is what lindlelof is like, I'm glad I never watched lost.

[What Came Before]

And then there's the geologist, whose primary function is mapping the damn cave system with those drone things, getting completely and irrevocably lost as soon as he leaves the group. It's his drones doing the mapping. Why the fuck does he not have any way to contact them to find out where he is in the cave system that they are mapping?

[What Came Before]

Right?  by that point I was just fucking infuriated by the out of character bullshit.

[What Came Before]

On the other hand, how movie worthy is slow, thorough, scientific practice?

It's a bit semantic apocalyptic in how the boys own adventurers of yesteryear crash into the expectations of today and simply do not survive, and yet nor would the action and excitement expectations survive contact with actual scientific practice!

[What Came Before]

yeah, but compare to the way things were handled in Alien, seems much more realistic than the journey to moronville of Prometheus.

Which is a shame, because I'd like to take the movie's attempt at big ideas more seriously, but when its execution of consistent characters is less than one-dimensional, it's sort of impossible to take anything seriously.

[What Came Before]

Just to contribute to this, I believe that Prometheus is far more concerned with philosophical implications than with scientific.  Science fiction doesn't have any responsibility to actual science (that's why it's "fiction").  Science fiction, rather, challenges us to think critically about radical alterities and inhuman conceptions of the world/universe.

I wrote a non-academic response to Prometheus after it came out, wherein I try and defend what I interpreted as its primary concerns (which I think it handles very well):

http://roadsidepicnictalks.blogspot.com/2012_06_01_archive.html

[What Came Before]

Didn't read your paper (sorry I'm lazy today), but I would agree with your post. Some people tend to focus on the 'science' part too much and ignore the 'fiction'. If it takes place in space, if there is an alien, or if there is a laser beam, its science fiction .

[mrganondorf]

Also hated this movie.  I think that a lot of the general story about the engineers could have been the same, but it was presented in such a convoluted way.  Three cheers for Aliens, the best one.  Prometheus was such a let down after its kick ass trailer.

[Madness]

Aliens 2 also deserves distinction, no?

[mrganondorf]

Aliens 2 also deserves distinction, no?

Ima get mah geek on:

1) Alien - 1979
2) Aliens - 1986
3) Alien^3 - 1992

I must agree, AlienS is the best of all! 

[Madness]

Lol. Yeah. My brain has been (hopefully) temporarily incapacitated. I can tell you about... Emotions or something about Child Disorders, maybe?