Prometheus

  Never, to my memory, have I had such polar feelings for a movie as I sat and watched it.  I remember liking a movie in the theater and then disliking it several hours later - and vice versa - but this film had me flipping back and forth on my opinion of it from minute to minute.  Ridley Scott's Prometheus sent me reeling on a sine curve of opinions - well, more like a cosine curve since I liked the opening sequence quite a bit.  I found the main performances of Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender to be quite opposites as well.  Rapace, who I didn't really care for as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films, really impressed me here with her performance as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the faithful leader of the intergalactic journey to discover the origin of mankind.  Fassbender, who I have loved in everything I have seen him in, didn't really do it for me here.
  At some points in this film, I was in awe of the detailed sets and effects that Scott put together and at other times, I was literally laughing at how awful it was.  And for the record, the film did not intend to attain an ounce of humor during these moments.  I found the movie's concept to be fascinating, but the execution was so inconsistent.  I was pulled out of the film by so many things, from Idris Elba's brutal southern accent to an inexplicably nonsensical abdominal extraction procedure.  I loved the landscapes that Scott created in this new and exciting world, but found the dust storm cheap and recycled.  I loved the way that they sent robotic auto-mapping probes into the dome in order to get a three dimensional sense of every nook and cranny, but wasn't frightened by things that I was supposed to be frightened by.  Even though the idea of humans going billions of miles from Earth in order to discover where they came from is interesting, the way that it played out in the final act was extremely predictable.
  Furthermore, why in the world did Ridley Scott decide to use a young man dressed up in old-man makeup to play the elderly father figure in this film?!  It looks horrible and is another example of how I was completely taken out of this film at times.  Guy Pearce, who probably mandated quite a fee, was cast as an extremely old man and certainly should have been replaced with an actor who was actually really, really old.  It would have preserved authenticity while saving quite a bit of money - money that could have been spent on a tighter, more cohesive script.
  I haven't seen a good science fiction movie in quite a long time, and that streak was not broken this evening.  I think the ratio of the minutes I spent shaking my head to the minutes I spent fully invested was probably something like 5:3, so I would have to say that this is one sci-fi film that I would wait to see on Blu-Ray or DVD.

*Note: (and a bit of a spoiler alert I guess, but not really) Prometheus is being sold as sort of a prequel to the Alien franchise and the end more than leaves open the probability of more films being made that bridge that gap.