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I must disagree with this review entirely, I thought the film was brilliant.
The Alien saga has never been about answering complex questions about human nature through science fiction lore or dialogue. It has always been the sense of suspense and trauma that has driven the series. This is not to say that the films don’t deal with complexities of human nature. (Though lets be honest this was hardly a concern in alien 2 or 3)
The Alien sagas do so but they do so through horror and gore and the events which occur in the film rather than the stories behind them E.G. playing on gender roles as aliens impregnate male humans who give birth to aliens in horrific ways while a female character always remains the protagonist. In that sense this film was very much in line with the alien saga with brilliantly executed scenes of suspense (e.g. Noomi Rapace in the surgery machine).
The characters in prometheus each represent a different aspect of human nature and each character deals with the inevitability of death in their own way. They are not meant to be deep characters to sympathise with but just archetypes who play out in a certain way, there are hardly any characters in the alien saga (other than the main character) who are worth becoming emotionally attached to.
I agree with you that it is a bit cheap to gloss over certain plot elements and that the dialogue and script could’ve been better, however with any of these films the audience must choose to buy into the ideas from the get go therefore it shouldn’t be too much of an issue to have an android at the centre of the plot. As for the “deeper” plot lines, Prometheus is meant as part 1 of a trilogy and we can expect answers in the coming films.
Although I did not like the idea of unexplained plot elements, Prometheus is not the type of films where clear cut answers are required, it is a film which confronts you with uncomfortable, claustrophobic scenes, scares, disgusts but at the same time is executed so well that it captivates, I certainly felt that throughout the film there were moments of brilliance which matched that of Alien.