Prometheus – Ridley Scott’s prequel to the Alien franchise – is an exercise in hype. The buzz started twelve months ago with the trailer, notched up with the viral videos, and then went crazy with the word of mouth (I was told that a friend fainted during a screening). The problem is that the hype doesn’t stop at the start of the movie. The film continues to promote itself all the way through, stopping every so often to tell us what’s going on and why it’s so important. Prometheus is an event movie. Sadly, it’s an event in the style of the Olympics: self-important, way over budget and tedious. At least the Olympics has the erotic delights of the volleyball heats. All Prometheus has to offer are contract-stipulated, repetitive shots of Charlize Theron’s fully clothed backside.

The original Alien movie was all about man’s complex relationship with nature. The titular monster would smother its victims, lay an egg inside them and then burst out as a rampaging xenomorph (and he doesn’t even buy you dinner ). The embryonic stage plays with fears of rape and disease. As a xenomorph, the creature is a metaphor for the relentless, destructive power of nature. It is the answer to every fear about what lurks beneath the surface of a dark sea; a raging, unstoppable beast that answers only to the logic of its own appetites. It cannot be reasoned with.

Crucially, Alien and its sequels didn’t state any of these ideas openly. The 1979 movie works on the level of the id. The interior of the humans’ spaceship is soft with undulating lights, like a womb. The craft in which the monster is discovered has the smooth, black rubbery interior of a bondage workshop. The creature does its dirty work with a penile appendage, and the xenomorph’s head is phallic. The reason why Alien stays inside your head for so long is that its images are unsullied by explanatory dialogue, which would reduce fear to theory. It’s a nightmare made flesh.

The problem with Prometheus is that it approaches its issues literally and unimaginatively. Of course, there are a lot of other problems, too. The acting is variable (Noomi Rapace accent wanders from Scotland to Wales, via Long John Silver) and the stand out performance by Michael Fassbender is undermined by his character’s decapitation. The movie loses all gravitas when Fassbender’s head rolls around the floor chatting away in his creepy camp monotone. The plot is unoriginal (a mix of Leviathan and Quatermass and the Pit) and everyone’s motivations change halfway through (when everyone stops to have sex). The heroes are supposed to be archaeologists, but their approach to their craft is more akin to demolition experts. All the characters are dumb. Where would you choose to spend the night when trapped in an alien spaceship? Somewhere near the exit or camped out in a room full of oozing black liquid? Worst of all, it’s unscary. When a flapping, gooey monster is plucked from Noomi’s belly, my theatre companion shouted out “Who ordered the calamari?” Seriously, there’s about five minutes of gore in this “horror” movie.

But the most annoying thing is the way that the movie signposts its themes. The big one is the relationship between parents and children. The movie opens with the ultimate generative act: an alien “engineer” dissolves himself into the waters of the young Earth to create the primordial soup from which we evolved. Flash forward and the humans go in search of their parents … only to discover that mommy and daddy want to wipe them out by returning to Earth with a cargo of alien DNA. Meanwhile, the head of Weyland industries has two children – a daughter that he seems to despise and an android who is devoted to him (although the android later suggests that he’d like to kill his father; Sigmund Freud, they’re playing our song). Noomi Rapace can’t have a baby but gets impregnated with alien DNA and ends up birthing a jellyfish, which she does her best to kill. The only person in the movie without daddy issues is the wisecracking, cigar smoking black pilot. He’s too busy being a cliché.

There’s nothing wrong with a touch of metaphor, but Ridley is so obsessed with showing us how clever he is that these allusions crowd out the plot and might be why the movie grinds to a halt halfway through (something many reviewers have spotted). Whereas Alien was a tight, taught little movie with sparse dialogue that let images speak for themselves, Prometheus is so in love with its own epicness that it forgets to tell a story. It’s Ben Hur without the chariot race. Prometheus  even comes with a soaring strings soundtrack that (while very good) undermines all the onscreen tension. It’s hard to be frightened about the descent into the bowels of an alien craft when the journey is accompanied by the theme tune to Gone With the Wind.

All of this might have been forgivable if there were some interesting answers to the questions that Prometheus throws up. But there aren’t. The engineers who created us are, despite their high technology, roaring beasts of the living dead variety. There may or may not be a God; life may or may not be worth living. Nihilism rules everything: children want to kill parents, parents want to kill children. The movie has no moral centre or voice of responsibility, only a constant search for knowledge. It's an episode of Star Trek, written by Richard Dawkins.

I’ve been waiting for this all year - the arrival of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Apparently it adds a whole new dimension to the Alien mythos, which is a pity because the series had a pretty sound teleology already. Folks have been guessing about the origins of the Aliens for months now, but I guess the title “Prometheus” is a bit of a giveaway. He’s the fellow who stole fire from the gods and brought suffering to the world as a result. Benign ignorance gave way to enlightened misery. I presume that the Aliens started out as rat catchers and got ideas above their station.

I resent the desire of modern directors to retread old ideas and give them two dimensional back stories (Batman, the Marvel comics, Star Trek etc). In some cases, the result is prosaic but in others is does real damage to the power of the original. One of the great things about the Alien is, well, its alieness. It’s terrifying because we can’t understand it and it inverts our understanding of nature (which usually places us at the top of the food chain). Explain too much and the threat becomes easier to understand and, potentially, to control.

It’s surely no coincidence that the Alien cycle dominated the screen in the late 70s to early 90s, the golden age for schlock. The Aliens shared something in common with that other great monster of the era, the zombie. Like the Alien, the zombie had no personality; there was no twirling moustache or vampiric charm. It was an unstoppable force that couldn’t be negotiated with - an apt evil for a period defined by urban terrorism, AIDS or the Viet Cong.
Back in the time of I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the zombies weren’t the real villain. They were usually controlled by a mastermind who wanted to exploit them for cheap labour. But when George A Romero released Night of the Living Dead (1968), they became independent entities and the focus of the story. The zombie as imagined by Romero is a revolutionary being. It is neither good nor evil but instead following an agenda that smacks of historical determinism: the zombie will bite you, you will die, you will become a zombie (“When the revolution comes, we will all eat caviar!”).

There’s no escaping the revolution, you can only hide or succumb. A good parallel is found in Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), in which anyone who falls asleep wakes up reborn as an alien entity. The zombie and the body snatcher movies are nihilistic from the heroes’ point of view because they can’t win. But the movies aren’t necessarily pessimistic from the audience’s point of view because neither director casts their agents of doom as explicitly evil. The body snatchers want everyone to be equal and peace among all nations; the zombie want everybody to be eaten. They are an amoral part of nature - just like the Alien that suckers onto John Hurt’s face and lays its egg in his belly ("At least buy me dinner first...")

The greatest statement on this topic was Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). His heroes escape the zombies by locking themselves up in a mall and, at first, our sympathy is squarely with the humans. But as we see them bicker and slip into a parody of consumer culture (they go “shopping” and fill their hiding space with the latest fashions and electronics) we begin to lose sympathy. By the time a few months have past and the zombies are still relentlessly throwing themselves against the glass windows of the mall, we start to ask why the humans don’t just unlock the doors and surrender to the inevitable. One of them awakes from a nightmare to find herself “escaping” in a helicopter. But there is no escape, for the world is gone. In the 2004 remake, the humans reach an island that looks like a paradise - until they see hundreds of zombies running down the beach towards them. The scene is reminiscent of a Saturday night in Majorca.

Romero went too political with his 1985 Day of the Dead. That movie features a military squad hiding underground while the zombies rule the world above. As they debate what to do with the undead, the director heavily signposts his sympathy for the zombies. Romero’s liberalism got the better of him. By the time of Land of the Dead (2005), the zombies now have personalities and the movie concludes that dead and living can live side by side. This ending betrays Romero’s original vision; the zombies evolve from a metaphor for ceaseless evolutionary change into a rational political force like the IRA. I don’t buy it.

Does the same happen to the Alien in Prometheus? I don’t know yet and I’d appreciate it if readers don’t email or Tweet the answer, but I’ll be disappointed if there’s something human about their origin. Personally, I’ve always shared the view of the monster articulated by crewmember Ash from the first movie: “I admire its purity: A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Ash could be describing himself, for he is shown to have a duty to the corporation that goes beyond any loyalty he should have to the people who have presented themselves to him as friends. But then Ash, too, is another revolutionary stage in evolution. If the Alien bursting from John Hurt’s chest is the movie’s first surprise, the second (and maybe bigger one) is the fact that Ash is revealed to be a “Goddam robot.” Here is another organism that will surpass us - inevitably.