Don't blame Damon Lindelof. Blame Ridley Scott. (spoilers-inside)

In the roughly 10 hours since I walked out of the theater last night, my mind has continued to process just how awful this movie is. It's unbelievably bad - everything you've read is true. The flute. The white, squishy buttons on the Engineers' control deck. The captain intuiting that the planet is not the Engineers' home planet but rather the place they developed their weapons of mass destruction - which of course begs the question of why the Engineers were instructing ancient civilizations as to how to reach not their home planet, but some remote place where they made weapons of mass destruction, Vickers and Janek strangely going off to have a quickie in the midst of what would have been the biggest discovery ever made by man and with two crew members stranded inside the temple - which in turn was inside a huge dust/electric storm, the very strange and ineffective scene where Vickers reveals that Weyland is her father - at which point no one cared, Vickers and Shaw running for hundreds of yards to try to escape the rolling Derelict ship when it was painfully obvious that all they needed to do was run a few yards to either side - in fact when Shaw trips, all she does is roll about three times and she is out from the path of the Derelict (which then stops and tips over on her but still), the stupid scene with the Engineer's head where they reanimate it and it explodes - which didn't seem to have any effect on anything in the movie at all, the list goes on and on and on. It's just an embarrassingly bad movie. And yes, I think much of the reason for its awfulness is Damon Lindelof's writing. I didn't see how anyone could enjoy Lost and that whole JJ Abrams/Damon Lindelof schtick of writing a bunch of random dumb shit and then pretending that it all made sense in the greater context of some larger story that only intellectuals could perceive/understand. It's a scam. But I don't blame Lindelof. I place the blame for Prometheus squarely with Ridley Scott. Scott chose Lindelof as the writer. Scott surely saw or could have seen the complete train wreck this film was going to be very early on in the shooting process and could have stopped it. To think that Scott waited 30+ years to revisit his masterpiece and then did this to it is almost unthinkable. But it happened. So it's unforgivable. I haven't seen the AVP movies, so I can't comment on them, but having seen Prometheus I rank it and the four main Alien movies in the order they came out: 1. Alien; 2. Aliens; 3. Alien 3; 4. Resurrection; and 5. Prometheus. It's worse than the prison planet, religious bullshit in Alien 3. It's worse than the half-human/half-alien "sympathetic" creature at the end of Resurrection. It makes no sense that this was allowed to happen. The last thing: Somewhere in the back of my mind for years now has been the idea that it's a little strange that so much of the Alien story and universe has been crafted around the artwork of J.R. Giger. Don't get me wrong - I love Giger's artwork and think it's a large part of why the original Alien film was so incredible. But something has been nagging at me regarding the fact that the original xeno was based on a preexisting Giger painting - it was just something Ridley Scott saw and said "That's our alien." Including the telescoping internal tongue, etc. The same is true for the Space jockey - I saw an interview with Ridley where he said he wanted something large and imposing in the center of that dais, and that Giger then went and designed the Space Jockey. There was no real backstory to the Space Jockey or Engineers, and there was no real tie-in with the Alien story - Scott just wanted a cool visual. And it was a cool visual and was one of my favorite things about Alien - just wondering who/what the Space Jockey was and what had happened to him (other than the obvious facehugger chest explosion). So they then went back after the fact and tried to craft a story around that image - and based the entire Prometheus movie on it. I don't think I'm articulating my point here very well - but it's always seemed a bit strange that they did it this way - that there was apparently no coherent story behind all of this. They just included some cool imagery in the original film - the xeno and the Space Jockey - and now have gone back and tried to create an origins story around that imagery. I think that might be part of the problem. But the main problem is how amazingly lame the backstory they came up with is, and how poorly it was translated to the screen. Go see Prometheus. And if you are a real fanboy try to convince yourself that it's not that bad. But I think if you really think about it and are honest with yourself, you'll admit it's not very good - especially considering how amazingly awesome it could have been. I have enjoyed the commentary and speculation on this forum about 1,000 times as much as I enjoyed the film itself. The version of the film I had put together in my mind based on the analysis here was so much more interesting and impactful than the actual film. It's sad, really. But the blame for it should be falling squarely on Ridley Scott, not Damon Lindlof. Lindelof is part of the problem, yes, but one that Scott should have seen and rejected way before any of this actually came to light.