Released this month, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is a return to the iconic motifs that comprise the two sci-fi films that bolstered his career early on. I admire the film for attempting to engage with big questions, but it chokes on its own hubris at times while at others it appears to give up its ambitions altogether, settling for something perfectly mundane. It’s disappointing, not because it’s a bad movie (it’s not) but because it’s an average movie that should have been terrific. I agree with the consensus that the film is a narrative mess saved by striking visuals and terrific acting from the two or three actors who are given something substantial to work with. Watching it, you get a sense that a much longer movie was slashed to appease the short attention-span contemporary audiences are trained to have. The horror is oddly neutered, the plotting and pacing are clumsy.
Technically a prequel to Alien (set in the same universe, utilizing the backstory of the nefarious Weyland Corporation and the “Space Jockey” corpse seen in Alien) but thematically closer to Blade Runner (questions of creation, responsibility and existence) this film feels like a return to the well, or a belated victory-lap/expansion similar to David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which takes the structures and themes dealt with so perfectly in the Lost Highway / Mulholland Drive duo and stretches them out into a rambling cinematic improvisation. Unnecessary, but interesting. Prometheus stretches too much to connect to Alien: A perfectly satisfying ending is ruined by a tacked-on epilogue showing the origin of that film’s creature. It’s a terrible scene that has little to do with the rest of Prometheus.
You could argue that the symbolism in both Alien and Blade Runner is heavy-handed, but I’m a fan of Ingmar Bergman so I obviously have no problem with heavy-handed symbolism. I actually find both of those films to be totally effective in their use of symbolism and open-ended exploration of open-ended themes.
There’s a scene in Alien where Ian Holm’s character attempts to kill a woman by shoving a rolled-up pornographic magazine down her throat. Soon after, he is beheaded, and white liquid spurts out of his mangled body (he is an android). Take this into account alongside H.R. Geiger’s iconic creature design (a big part of Geiger’s M.O. is to make everything evoke bio-mechanical genitals,) and the terror-of-sex theme smashes out pretty loudly. 
Blade Runner climaxes with a human-like artificial life-form asking his creator (who calls him “the prodigal son”) for more life. When he is denied, he says, exhausted and frustrated “I wasn’t more life, father” (or “fucker” in the sub par theatrical cut), kisses his creator, and then kills him by applying pressure to the man’s eyes. Soon after, the prodigal son is cradling a dove in the rain on a rooftop, a nail pushed through his hand, as he quietly dies, lamenting that the extraordinary things he has seen and done will vanish.
The symbolism in those films is not very subtle, but it is not overbearing either, and here's why: If those big themes aren’t your bag, you can always enjoy Alien as a well-crafted monster movie (probably the best monster movie ever made, in fact), and you can always enjoy Blade Runner as a futuristic film noir about a bounty hunter pursuing a band of outlaws. Both of these films are terrific on ether level.
Prometheus doesn’t allow us to enjoy it on multiple levels. The religious/reproductive themes occur literally within the reality of the film. The characters are aware of what their experiences imply, and they discuss them openly and literally. For example: A temple-like place that appears to be an alien weapons factory (installed by the race of aliens who ignited the start of all life on earth) is discovered to have been built “two-thousand years ago”. Based on the timeline of the film, that would mean our creators began making these bio-weapons in what we call the first century. The implication is muddled, but obviously Christian. Did we anger “The Engineers” (as the character Elizabeth Shaw names them) by killing Christ? By allowing Christianity to flourish? (I’m aware that not everything that happened in that century had to do with Christianity, but given the film’s explicit Christian motifs, I have to assume…)
I’m excited to see Hollywood tackle big, unanswerable questions, and I’m excited whenever science fiction is used to do what it does so uniquely well (that is, when it is used to contemplate, ask questions and explore ideas not easily explored by other genres.) Unfortunately, this film’s fundamentalist/materialist insistence on literally locating all of its ideas in the physical realm inhabited b the characters makes it less like Persona and more like Ancient Aliens.
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