ACTUALLY, I totally get the scene where the founder ripped the android's head off. It was an homage to Bladerunner (another Ridley Scott film). It's a takeoff of the scene where Rutger Hauer first pats his creator on his head lovingly, and then crushes his skull. That scene actually made it for me.
ANYWAY, here's my rant:
- First off, as far as I'm concerned, they contradict a major element of the original Alien move: In Prometheus, the "Founders" are essentially humanoids which happen to be a bit larger than we are, and we are supposed to believe that what made the dead pilot in the control chair in the original Alien film look so big and alien is that he was wearing an armored space suit.
The trouble is that, in the first film, it was quite apparent that this was NOT the case. When they examined the alien in the first film, it was a dessicated corpse, and they clearly showed his MUCH larger than human ribs protruding from his exploded chest. Those rib bones were as big around as a normal human forearm. Heck even the scale seemed wrong. I'd have to watch the original again, but I'd say that the pilot was MUCH bigger than the space suited ones in Prometheus.
-----
EDIT
Here, I found a photo. As you can see they took a LOT of liberties with the size of the founders in Prometheus:
and in this photo it's obvious we aren't looking at a space suit:
- WTF was with the two guys who inexplicably stayed behind inside the building when the storm hit (despite the fact that they had a huge head start on everyone else, wanted the hell out of there badly, and had a detailed 3D map so I can't see how they got lost)? If they were so terrified, WHY THE HELL would they camp out in the room with the scary big alien bust sculpture, the oozing alien cylinders, and the decapitated founder at the door? I could have found a hundred better places to camp out for the night.
- There was ABSOLUTELY no valid plot purpose for the scientist who was incinerated to come back to life and kill everyone in the hangar deck. Other than scare factor, that whole scene had ZERO purpose. He had apparently already served his purpose by impregnating his girl friend. As far as I was concerned it was 12 wasted minutes that could have been better used to make the rest of the movie less disjointed. Even worse, that scene was COMPLETELY IGNORED afterwards, so what's the point?
It's almost as if it was added as an afterthought. No one else ever refers to it again. The Captain just finished watching 4 of his crew get torn apart by that thing, and then he goes back to the bridge to play his squeeze box and stare at Charlize Theron's ass. No one else in the crew seems particularly concerned that they just scraped up 4 crew members off the decks. No water-cooler talk about how screwed up that was?
- Along those lines, all the characters seemed completely oblivious to other things happening on the ship. The impregnated scientist knocks out two people who apparently never raise an alarm or go look for her, or even care that she's running loose. When she does turn up, no one is particularly concerned or surprised that she's no longer pregnant and that she's covered in blood and has 40 staples across her tummy.
You would THINK that, looking the way she did, covered in blood, and possibly infected, that NO ONE would want to let her anywhere near Mr. Weyland who looks like he would drop dead from infection if you sneezed on him.
There are several scenes like that, where something major happens, and everyone else is oblivious.
- We are expected to believe that Charlize Theron, being thoroughly paranoid to the point of having a cabin that can be a life-boat, and a sophisticated auto-doc in said cabin, just happens to leave her cabin unlocked so that the impregnated scientist can conveniently use her auto-doc and leave an alien inside of it.
- For God-like aliens, these "founders" were pretty reckless. We're to believe they built hundreds of ships to exterminate humanity (and maybe other species they founded?) but none of them seems to have been able to get off the ground (until one of us is stupid enough to wake up a founder pilot from cryo-sleep anyway). They apparently DID get as far as launching one in the original Aliens movie, but the stupid pilot got himself killed and let it crash land.
- Now granted, this may get explained in a sequel, but WHY would these Founders go through all the trouble of developing these very sophisticated bio-weapons to exterminate us? If all it took to populate the Earth with humans was for ONE alien to contaminate the ocean with his dissolved body, then surely they had the tech to destroy all life on Earth without cluster-bombing it with thousands of those alien spawning canisters, which apparently needed to go through several breeding cycles in order to ultimately make an alien that would kill us all?
To possibly answer my own question, it's possible there was a grander scheme. Maybe seeding the Earth was phase one and phase two all along was to use humans as a medium to breed these acid blooded aliens? But if so, it seems absurd. If so, why go to the trouble of starting religions on Earth?
- Why was the very first ship they discovered conveniently targeted at Earth? Were they ALL targeted at Earth (Did they REALLY need that many bio weapons to exterminate humanity)?