Watching: Prometheus

When I saw a couple of the trailers on YouTube a couple weeks ago, I knew this would be the movie my brother would be most likely to take me and Mom to see. And so it was. And so this is "the Space Jockey movie" (using the big guys' nickname from Alien; here they're called "Engineers"). I was warned (by online reviews, not my brother) that some people didn't like it. But I did, and I can see why it has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. My brother thought it was brilliant. I have different standards; I thought it was at least good enough, though not as brilliant as, say, Alien and Aliens. And even though I'd already read all the spoilers on the TV Tropes page, I still managed to find myself surprised by that last Space Jockey. There were a few predictable things. The guys who panic and flee being the first to die? Check. There were also some weak points, mostly involving characters carrying the "idiot ball" (there's a whole list on the TV Tropes Prometheus page under "Idiot Ball" At least Fifield and Milburn have an excuse (their panic robbed them of their reason). Weyland is similar in that he's a corporate "king" (the word is actually used, though not in any official sense) whose desire to defeat death overrides his reason. But Janek (the pilot) has no excuse but picks up the idiot ball anyway and runs with it. The unpredictable part involved Vickers, Shaw, and a certain director, but I won't spoil that one. There were some very clever reveals involving Vickers, Weyland, David (the android, whose nature this time is revealed almost immediately), the surviving Space Jockey, the nature of his Engineer faction's mission, and — the stinger at the end, right before the credits. I did notice they used the Alien Astronaut theory (as in Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin) as the movie's starting premise. Back to my opinion. I did enjoy it, enough that I plan to get the Blu-Ray to play on that 50+ inch TV I intend to get.