Hopefully Scott can really bring everything full circle with Alien: Covenant. But there's also a lot to love with a little bit of greatest hits moments from the entire Alien series. Prometheus' narrative can be a jumbled mess, especially in the third act, and I think that prevents it from coming close to the early franchise's roots. I know that all of the Alien films pride themselves on chaos, but at least the narratives never strayed too far away. I think the biggest problem people have with Prometheus (even more so than failing to answer all questions) is that it tries to be too many different types of film at once. It's one of those films that you have to admire because of how much work and effort was put into making this Scott's vision from the start. It's 5 years old and I'm not sure I have seen a science fiction film look more hauntingly real than Prometheus.
This film could easily hold a class as to how to properly shoot cinematography. His direction and the cinematography is absolutely astounding.
Rapace has a particular scene lying on a medical bed that is some of the best acting this entire series has offered, but I think this film works far better when the vision stays in Ridley Scott's court of directing. That's not to say this film doesn't have some great character work. In other Alien-related films you made not need as much character development because the film isn't built around its cast, but this film feels more character centric and slower paced than others, hence needed some more work. However, besides Rapace and Fassbender, most of the casts' characters aren't fleshed out enough. Every Alien film's strength seems to always lie with its cast, but perhaps this was the best ensemble of any of the films to date. The film assembles quite the ensemble, including Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Benedict Wong, and Idris Elba. Of course, the film rarely makes all of the answers to these questions accessible without analysis, but it interests me far more than another film hanging onto the scares of a two-mouthed creature. To me, the parts of Prometheus that work the most are when the film is trying to build mythology around the mysterious "Engineers" and their possible relation to the creation of humans and/or Xenomorphs. I feel like Scott really wanted to make a science fiction film with exploration at the center of it, and throw in some Alien terror and action to create a blockbuster-y feel. Prometheus is a fascinating and sometimes thrilling addition to the series, albeit with an imperfect way of going about it. Ridley Scott's return to the Alien franchise was a divisive one.