Initial reaction to Alien

Yeah you made the point that in 1979 critics had this reaction in an era where science fiction had much less credibility and films like Alien were considered extremely dark and disturbing. You have to take into account the fact that the culture of the times is very different as evidenced by dark science fiction films like Moon and District 9 getting rave reviews. Aliens has an aggregate score of 100% on RottenTomatoes today.

It really doesn't matter how many times you watch prometheus it its still not that great. The difference between the times as you mentioned Drake, is the fact that people were disturbed about it. The same way people hated on the film Scarface, due to the amount of gore. Remember, Alien in my opinion changed the way we look at body horror and films like species, the thing have been ripping it off since. Prometheus doesn't bring anything new to the table, and that what makes it weak when comparing it with other Sci fi films.

oh pleeeeease!!!...they were so lucky back in the 70's....make creature jump out of a CHARACTERS CHEST AND IT WAS THE MOST HORRIFIC THING SEEN IN CINEMA HISTORY!!!.....times has changed...Alien was the first and therefore it will always be on the pedestal...do not....not...not,not get me wrong....it was brilliant...it spawned a whole franchise and without it Prometheus would have never even happened.....but be fair....to be original these days takes way more imagination than back then....everything has been done already...so give Prometheus the break it deserves!!!

No offence here but Alien was never original... there were hundreds if not thousands of b-movies made in the 50's, 60's and 70's that featured alien creatures killing people one by one, and half of them were set on a spaceship. and the Ash element wasn't original either. Corporate conspiracy was a staple of the 60's and 70's. The only thing that made Alien better, was that they approached it seriously in terms of the script, the photography, the set design and the creature design.

i swear, in regard to "professional critiques" of PROMETHEUS, one might think we did a time loop back to the summer of 1979

I'll admit that Alien 2 is my favorite movie of all time, but the only reason I was so wowed by it is because I had scared silly by Alien 1. Now, why would I expect an Alien prequel to be even better than both of them? Because the xenos were killing super advanced space jockeys, something which doesn't seem possible, so there's a huge mystery there. From what I can tell by the trailers, the new xenos are just as bad as the old one, so that is cool, it just doesn't answer how a chest burster got a hold of that other Engineer, where the whole saga really begins.