When the Challenger blows up, you don’t waste your time complaining about its paint job. But beyond Sweet et al.‘s observations about the lack of dramatic tension, the lack of mystery, the lack of story, science does play a disproportionate role here. Alien was about a bunch of truckers on a lonely monster-haunted highway; Aliens, about a bunch of jarheads rediscovering, to their shock and awe, the nastier lessons of Viet Nam. Prometheus is about a scientific expedition ... and ... it’s blindingly obvious that Scott couldn’t be bothered to ensure that his “scientists” knew the difference between a gene and a bad joke. Much less anything about science as a profession.And so on.
So nobody thinks it remarkable when an archaeologist performs micro-necro-neurosurgery or runs a genetic analysis — anybody with an ologist on their resumé has gotta be a whizz at everything from microbiology to global general relativity, right? We’re shown a biologist who uses the word “Darwinism” as though it were a legitimate scientific term and not a dig invented by creationists: the same biologist who, in the penultimate act of a profoundly undistinguished career, runs with his tail between his legs at the sight of the first actual alien the Human race has ever encountered, even though it’s been dead for thousands of years. Then, a few hours later, watches a live serpentine alien perform what’s pretty obviously a threat display — and tries to pet it.
And yet, idiotic though that biologist may be, the scientist in me can’t really take personal offense because nobody in this shiny train wreck has a clue, from the pilot to the aliens to an on-board medical pod that, honest-to-God, is Not Configured for Females... Nobody bothers with any kind of orbital survey prior to landing (blind luck is always the best way to locate artefacts that could be anywhere on the surface of a whole bloody planet — although that’s downright plausible next to being able to find a multi-mooned gas giant from 34 lightyears away, based on a prehistoric game of tic-tac-toe someone scratched into a cave wall during the last ice age). A survey team goes charging into an unexplored alien structure and takes off their helmets the moment someone says “oxygen”. Their captain leaves the bridge unattended for a quick fuck, right after informing two crew members stranded in the bowels of said structure that some kind of unknown life-form reading is popping in and out of sensor range just down the hall from them.
Scott's apparent facility at SF as exemplified by Bladerunner and Alien was precisely his incomprehension of the genre and its themes, which led him to avoid taking charge of the meaning or resonances of the stories, left sensibly in the hands of great scriptwriters, and concentrate instead on the stuff within his skill set, as a director who cut his teeth in advertising: making it all look amazing. Later, having the career gravitas that persuaded people to take his narrative skills seriously, he revisited films that should have been let alone, burdening them with half-baked meditations on supposedly profound issues (What is life? What is humanity? What is free will?) that actual SF has found tiresome for six decades.
Never confuse serendipity for proficiency.