Prometheus

On Friday night, I caught the opening of Prometheus.

Let's get the non-spoilery stuff out of the way first: this movie was solid entertainment and pretty damn awesome.

Sure, the science is shaky, but it was a gorgeous film and it had few slow points. It was pretty good in 3-D, too.

From here on out, there be spoilers.
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You were warned.

It's the latter half of 21st century. Somehow we haven't managed to obliterate ourselves. A couple of archaeologists find clues that there's some aliens out there who want us to drop by for a chat... or so it seems to them.

Flash forward a few years. The spaceship Prometheus arrives at a wild, raw world determined by coordinates extrapolated from what the archaeologists (Shaw and her boyfriend whose name escapes me).

They land. Then things go terribly, terribly wrong.

It's a predictable movie. As I said above, it's gorgeous in practically every aspect. It's a satisfying quasi-prequel to Alien and its sequels. There are no Preadators [EDIT: Predators! GAH! What is up with my rotten spelling lately???] in this film and there don't need to be any.

In a nutshell, the plot is about our origins using... well... a bunch of wonky, new-age nonsense but once you accept that (and you kind of have to in order to follow this movie) it's moderately-solid (if you discount the factual errors Neil DeGrasse Tyson has found in it).

It's got an expansive cast of largely-cliche and forgettable characters with three exceptions: Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, David Fassbender as the android David, and Charlize Theron as the expedition leader Meredith Vickers.

And, to be perfectly honest, even these three don't get a lot of character development.

The story is a good adventure ride. It gets choppy in parts and it's totally open for a sequel, but it's worth seeing in theaters.

Oh, the Wikipedia article on this film spoils the entire plot quite well. Just FYI.