4. The Fanboy Pandering
If you're making a prequel to something, there's nothing wrong with answering questions from the original, and calling back to that film a couple of times throughout. Prometheus does both of these things, but poorly. When you are trying to resolve mysteries from a previous film, you sure as hell better have a satisfying resolution when people have been wondering for over thirty years what the answer might be. So, in Alien, there was a massive turret-like thing in which a skeleton was lying, with a hole in its chest, making it evident it was the victim of a chest-burster (how the aliens in that film reproduce). It's something which has been fascinating to fans for years, and in Prometheus, the answer is finally revealed. It's a driver's seat. That's basically it. It's something an alien straps into to drive a spaceship. Not only does this let us down, but it also kind of ruins the original film. When you think of the mystery and the fascination that the 'space-jockey' (as it was called) produced, it undermines the intrigue that original film gave us. The main example of pandering the film exhibits, though, is a moment where all the scientists are searching through caves to find a shrine dedicated to the Xenomorphs (the aliens from the original series of films). Not only is this cheap and heavy-handed, but a post-credits scene shows a early evolutionary version of the Xenomorph come out of a giant tentacle monster that comes about through a narrative leap that won't even bother trying to explain and seven foot tall, muscle bound, bright white aliens nicknamed 'Engineers'. Two things, if there was a shrine to the Xenomorphs, why was there an early version of the Xenomorph at the end? They were praising something that literally didn't exist yet. Second, I hope you're happy, Prometheus. You made our favourite monster in a product of a giant tentacle monster screwing an albino swimsuit model. Nice job.