@deathforsale The space Jesus/engineer thing has been more than just hinted at, if you look at some of RS own quotes. Perhaps when some of that was toned down the holes were all that was left. The alien mural that is shown does look very cross / crucifiction like.

I thought the movie was beautiful and they used the 3D in an interesting way with the holographic map.  I would actually reccommend that people see this film in 3D and the only other film I would say that about is Avatar.  In every other 3D film I've seen, the 3D has been forgettable or actively annoying.

The biggest problem I had with the film was that the characters were stock characters without much elaboration.  You have the scientists with more curiosity than sense, the angry guy with a mohawk and tatoos, the dying rich guy who wants to live forever, the angry daughter etc.  They were so easy to predict.  The only really interesting character was David the android.  I had no idea what he was going to do or why.  I also had no idea what he had said to the engineer.  Based on some of his previous actions (poisoning Charlie) I was fully prepared to believe that he had deliberately enraged the Engineer to get the humans killed.

The part where Elizabeth was running around like an action hero, hours after a c-section were just silly.  Having reciently had surgery which left me with staples running up and down my belly, I can attest that after my surgery it was several days before I could walk, let alone jump and run and pull myself up by my arms or any of the other things Elizabeth was doing.  It kind of snapped my suspension of disbelief a little.

But the film was really more about the ideas than the characters or the action.  You didn't really need complex characters to convey the questions that Scott wanted to ask.

I saw the movie with my 74 year old mother and she was most dissatisfied with the film.  She agreed that it was beautiful and that the 3D was actually relevant.  But she thought the characters were poor, the acting was just adequit  and the questions Scott asked were boring.  Why are we here?  Who created us and why?  These questions are hardly new.  And Scott didn't really answer them.  Why did the Engineers create us and why did they decide to destroy us?  Scott may have answered those questions in interviews but they weren't answered in the film.  And without those answers, the film felt incomplete.  I can understand that people in that situation might never find those things out.  But I thought it was a poorer film without those answers.  Just asking questions doesn't fill the bill.

Will we find out those answers in a sequel where Elizabeth goes back to the Engineers' home planet?  I doubt it.  My feeling is that the Engineers acedentally  managed to wipe themselves out with their biowepons.    Otherwise they had 2000 years to come up with another plan to get rid of humanity.  Where are they?

@karas1 - Correct me if I'm wrong but you actually took your 74 year old mother to a sci-fi movie and she didn't quite get it!?... 

wormlander, she got it just fine.  It just wasn't to her taste.

This is the woman who inducted me into scifi when I was 2 by holding me on her lap while she watched Star Trek.

She likes optimistic scifi, she doesn't like distopias or futures where aliens are trying to kill us. 

She also thought the characters were uninteresting and under developed, a point of view which I kind of share. 

@karas1 - That's really funny considering the fact "Alien" is the darkest and most dystopian aliens-want-to-kill-us-all-movie ever produced.

 My theory is that the alien civilization which visited Earth many thousands of years ago had collapsed and been replaced by a new culture that was fanatically opposed to the actions of the previous civilization.

The archeologist before he was killed had expressed disappointment in what they had found.   This wasn't the civilization he had been looking for.

Another theory is that this wasn't the "creators" at all but one of the "creator"'s other creations who had managed to get to the planet first.

Alien is a dark movie, but it's not a distopia.  It's about a bunch of working class people who accidentally bring a hostile alien aboard their space ship.  You don't learn much about the society they live in.  It could be a distopia or a utopia or anything inbetween.

You could say that the company they worked for set them up to bring the alien aboard and considered them expendable.  But even that doesn't mean that the larger society is a distopia.

It should be noted that Prometheus isn't a distopia either.  The characters are manipulated by a rich a$$hole who is less concerned with their welfare than he should be.  But that could happen in almost any kind of society.

this is strange

wopsy dopsy

@karas1 - The term "dystopian" is not used exclusively to describe fictional settings in oppressive and penalistic societies.

dystopia – 1. an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. 2. The opposite of Utopia. [oxforddictionaries]

Since there is no objective way to describe a Utopian place or state, there's also no way to objectively define a Dystopian equivalent. Nomatter what movies you'd rather refer to as being "dystopian", none of them will ever describe a place which is truly 100% bad or unpleasant. It all comes down to what definition best suits your taste or argument (And there are plenty to go around). Personally, I'd say "Alien" even fits the societal definition of "dystopian", considering how the corporation, by dictating the conditions of their employees' lives for such extended periods of time, in effect functions as a remote-controlled, totalitarian miniature society aboard the ship.

Also, It really doesn't matter whether Ash was on a covert operation to bring back the alien lifeform or not. What is imperative though, as far as this discussion goes, is the company's policy to sacrifice their own crew members whenever this is deemed necessary (read; In order to maximize their profit).