Prometheus and AVP

@ Proxy & SnorkelBottom A person who knows much more about writing than me has just put up a review and given more credence to my earlier skepticism about the film. Ian Nathan at Empire.com writes: "There is no accumulation of dread, none of Alien’s haunted silences and primordial drones that slid beneath your bones. The film is too busy, too talky, too noisy by half. Awe, wonderment and terror need atmosphere to flourish. For all the CGI grandiosity, there is a flatness to the mood. Prometheus is strangely impatient, irritable, rushing its set-ups and squandering drama. Characters perish, but without any great wit or design, and in fits and starts. The film can’t fix on where it wants the action to occur, dragging the cast back and forth between the Apple-elegant fixtures of the good ship Prometheus and the grey-green bio-horror chambers of the ‘temple’. Motive is sorely lacking. And the stand-ins are no great shakes — somewhere in Switzerland Giger is snorting into his schnapps. Early on we glimpse beneath the exoskeleton — sorry, spacesuit — and the Space Jockey, sorry Engineer, turns out to be a overly-pumped bald bloke with dead-eyes who has no dialogue and punches people across the room. So basically they’ve spent two years in cryo to discover that God is Jason Statham."

(1st attempt returned a 404, sorry if this is duplicative.)  I hit this page searching for lindelof AND hamlet.  Turns out Damon Lindelof did produce a story that recapitulated Hamlet in the manner indicated above, along with much other, mostly British, source material, as Lost.  You can see my explanation here; you may want to skip to entry #18 if you're in a hurry.  It's also the only way to make sense of Lost's plot, therefore he must've expected us to first realize it was a puzzle that the show itself wouldn't provide the solution to, and then to solve it ourselves.  Few had the advantage I had, however, of having been Damon's friend.

Hamlet was a great choice for a you-solve-it mystery's basis, because of its play-within-the-play, "by which to catch the conscience of the king".  Imagine if Hamlet's visitation by a ghost had been deleted.  The 4th wall could stay intact while a character, Hamlet, showed us a miniature version of the hidden plot within, the play within the play, that we could then deduce the hidden details from.  That was done several times on Lost.