Yes there is a lot of depth to Prometheus, this makes me only hate it more. If Prometheus were just a silly horror film or a comic book movie then I'd be ok with it being mediocre.<p>Instead, they poured an immense amount of design skill into the sets and backgrounds to make a wonderfully beautiful movie. And they built up this tremendous premise and a fantastic universe. And they populated it with several truly deep and rich and wonderful characters. And they had those characters acted by outrageously talented actors (Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Guy Pierce).<p>And then they pissed it all away with a shoddy plot and incompetent direction.<p>Spoilers follow:<p>The engineer turns out to just be a dime store monster. Nobody's actions are interesting, meaningful, or seem to flow from any significant motive other than to conform to the plot. One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie (when Janek decides to commit suicide by ramming the engineer's ship) comes off as completely anti-climactic because it comes out of nowhere. Similarly, the major revelation of the movie of the planet being a biowarfare research station comes out of Janek's mouth but it is so out of place and out of character that you can almost hear the clanking boilerplate of dreaded exposition falling into position. Perhaps the most interesting character of the entire movie, David, remains nothing more than an automaton throughout the movie with only a gnat's whisker of a hint that he is anything more.<p>Prometheus the fictional spaceship is a "trillion dollar" mission which is unaccountably staffed by a handful of incompetents, fuckups, and pseudo-villains who throw away their lives for the silliest and least meaningful of reasons. It is an apt metaphor for the movie itself.