Thing is, you need to care/know about the canon a little if you expect the movie to make full sense. I definitely got the same sense I got from watching Lynch's "Dune" movie; it definitely feels more cohesive if you know the canon, but it's not totally necessary.
Okay, here goes...
I thought the film was
okay. My gripes are mostly about the characters and story. The visuals were very nice, and I appreciated the minimalist use of CG and the beautifully designed sets (though they were more or less just rebuilding the ones from Alien). Good sound editing too.
The soundtrack was kind of... cheesy, and not in a good way. I was really hoping Scott would go very minimalist and creepy with the score like in Alien. No such luck. The soundtrack really screwed up the tone at times. It was fine during the horror scenes, but the rest of the time it was too upbeat and grandiose. It was like John Cage or Bernard Herrman composed one half, and John Williams composed the other. It did not harmonize.
Characters were all pretty eh, with the exception of David, as Joe observed. Two-dimensional, B-list nobodies acting like... well... two-dimensional b-list nobodies. Vickers
(who, incidentally, I thought was an android from the start) was such a flat and lazy substitute for an antagonist. A bitch with a superiority complex who acts as if nothing is sacred.
Real deep there.
Shaw and Holloway were all over the place, and I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to like them or think of them as the purpose-driven, crazed scientist types. Either way, I did not shed a tear when Holloway
got infected and was reduced to a roasted marshmallow.
I was originally put off by Fifield's rote brusqueness, but I did like how eventually he and the nerdy dude he was such a dick to kind of became buds as they got their asses lost in the ruins. Too bad it was cut short by the
Hammerpede.
While I like Guy Pearce, not only was he poorly cast as Weyland, but the age make-up they put on him was piss poor. They should have just gotten an actual old man. Maybe John Hurt, since he was in the first Alien movie. Or Lance Henrikson, since Bishop was supposedly modeled after the head of the company. Would have been a nice little easter egg for the fans. It's not like Lance would have said no, he'll be in fucking
anything these days.
As everyone in this thread has said, there are parts that don't make much sense. One of the things that left me scratching my head was when
Fifield crab-walked back to the ship as some kind of crazed zombie monster. What was the reason for that? It would have made more sense if
it was the guy who swallowed the Hammerpede, because then you could pass it off as some kind of brain-controlling parasite or some such scifi bullshit. I mean, I assumed after Fifield got a face full of acid, he would have just fuckin' died, not come back as some rampaging maniac. On wikipedia, the reason provided is because he was exposed to the
black fluid, but if that's it's effect, why didn't Holloway also
go apeshit and start killing people after David put it in his drink? Not only would that have made more sense, but it would have still
given Vickers an excuse to flambé his ass with the flamethrower. The whole "just kill me" thing was too theatrical, and had me rolling my eyes.
Why did David shut off his camera when he went into
the Engineers' cryo chamber? I mean, Vickers was obviously in on it from the beginning, so why tune her out?
I also find it a little far-fetched that after Shaw
gave birth to the squid baby (which also didn't make much sense), that the rest of the crew would have just left it in there to grow into that giant thing that looks like it could star in a hentai series. Am I supposed to believe that after Shaw beat the piss out of her two lab assistants and ran off to Vicker's quarters that
nobody bothered to investigate?
And finally, the ending. If they didn't do a sequel, I think it would be a bit of a cop out, unless you want to accept David's reasoning that the Engineers' reason for wanting to
kill mankind was irrelevant. I probably could have accepted that if the rest of the movie was more cohesive, but to tack on even
more unanswered questions at the end just left me with huge blue balls.
As for the
Proto-xenomorph busting out of the Engineer's chest, I think it would have been better if after his tussle with the
Hentai squid, he wandered back to his ship dazed and wounded, going through the motions, sitting in the pilot's seat and
then it busted out. That extra minute of film would have tied it to Alien with a nice big bow. Lazy storytelling, right there. Gah.
So yeah, those are my gripes. Surprisingly few considering how many I usually have with today's blockbusters. It's worth a watch if you want a big budget scifi/horror that isn't insultingly dumb and/or if you're a fan of Alien and Giger's work.
Wow, I wrote a lot more than I meant to. Sorry...
Edit:
This image will be relevant to those who have seen it.
