Finally watched Ridley Scott's Prometheus after hearing very mixed opinions to it and, uh, it was that sinking experience where things start out looking really cool, and then there is something, after 10 minutes or so, just some little bit of poor acting or illogical behavior, that makes you go "hmm?", and then you keep watching hoping for it to pick up the trajectory towards the great movie it should be, but then there is another wrong detail, maybe a little bigger, and then comes something really fucked up that belongs in a B-movie, and you begin to realize that this isn't a great movie or even a pretty good movie but in fact a failure, a hack job, a grand gesture full of sloppy wrinkles* and when it's over you're in a strange mood because you still recall the great, imaginative, thought-provoking movie you thought it might be, and patiently waited for while irritation built steadily for two hours.

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*I wrote the one-sentence review about two months ago, and have since found that images and scenes from the movie keep popping up in my head, so clearly it worked on some level. I can't think of any other movie with such a gap between the visual style (brilliantly memorable) and the story (poorly written, poorly handled). Finding Ridley Scott in the same fold as Dario Argento and Brian de Palma** is a bit surprising, but he actually outdoes these loose cannon-auteurs in both good and bad ways. Does this mean Prometheus will become a cult movie? Or will the cringeworthy idiocies of the script linger as its tombstone?
**Speaking of de Palma, Prometheus borrows several key ideas from de Palma's Mission To Mars, an underrated work which despite its modest resources is superior as a total film in my view.