At 27 minutes and 3 seconds in the video:
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/GpEx7pdp2-Q?start=1623" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/GpEx7pdp2-Q?start=1623</a>]]>Interesting reads:
http://whatculture.com/film/prometheus-5-things-we-want-to-see-in-a-sequel.php
First lines:
Ridley Scott’s long anticipated Alien prequel Prometheus recently exploded onto our cinema screens and has already won plaudits for its mind-altering meld of breathtaking visuals, wonderfully rendered alien landscapes and awesomely conceived action sequences...
^^ See what I meant earlier about "The Emperor's New Clothes"?
A point on these universally-acclaimed genius visuals: yes, the 'alien' landscapes do look stunningly beautiful. That's mainly because
Iceland...
...has stunningly beautiful landscapes, naturally. Absolutely top marks on the choice of ext. filming locations, yes yes yes, but I can't in all honestly say I was gobsmacked by most of the alien decor once we got indoors. A lot of it I found pretty nondescript actually; the Engineer head sculpture is the big impressive set piece, and I'd already seen that pasted everywhere months before the film was released. I'm not arguing that it doesn't look sumptuous, I just didn't find much there to inspire genuine awe, in fact I didn't see anything strikingly original at all really.
Each of the
Alien films tried something different visually - the original goes without saying, that film birthed Giger's biomechanical Xenomorph universe, as well as the grubby, lived-in blue-collar human workplace, and just bowled everyone over with its novel vision, its unfettered artistic creativity;
Aliens brought a cleaner, more sterile military feel, with futuristic barracks and colony research facilities;
Alien3 gave us a grotty, industrial, labyrinthine prison setting (everything's filmed in a reddish-brown tint, rusting); Jeunet did his own OTT grotesque cartoon shite.
Prometheus was not particularly ambitious in its aesthetic approach, if you ask me - but then, it's not an
Alien film, is it
"awesomely conceived action sequences" 
Everyone needs to eventually admit to themselves that this film, just as a film, is pretty throwaway toss. You can still love it - knock yourself out - but it's toss. Like 2011's
The Thing premakequel, it doesn't actually need to exist - it brings little of any worth to the table (and before anyone starts, I don't think this is quite as pointless and crap as that was). It just needs to be asked once again; why not work hard on a good script, satisfactorily filled-out characters, a fascinating new take on this already well-established universe, before committing such a project to film and milking the moolah? Why wait so long without at least
striving for perfection and just failing, when the time comes to actually put it all together? I guess we'll never know.
