It showed the expedition had wealthy backing and was one of the early hints that Weyland was aboard.
Again, we didn't need to know this before hand. Also, when Theron says to Fassbender "what did he say?", this isn't "foreshadowing", it's ramming a plot point down our throat. Imagine how cool the scene where we see him in the wheel chair would have been, if we didn't know he was onboard. It would have been: "oh man, they are gonna freak when they see her covered in bloo... damn! weyland is onboard!". The way it played out was "oh, there's weyland, wondered when he was gonna turn up. why aren't they bothered she's covered in blood?".
Lazy lazy story telling.
Quite often in expeditions the crew who man the ship are quite separate from the expedition personnel and often aren't introduced much before hand. I don't see this as such a huge issue.
Not even Theron (the exped leader) seemed to know the captain of the ship.
The stacked cannisters were on the alien ship stored in the same kind of chamber as the eggs in the original alien. This chamber, during the original film production was referred to as the bomb bay. Just a thought but you might store the weapons slightly differently in the mechanism designed for deploying them than you do in the facility that is making them.
"A cave" with a giant head in it is a WMD manfacturering facility? I always find when I'm making highly dangerous genetic destroying ooze, that I want to do it in the least sterile place I can find.
The film is set at christmas, the crew explicitly note that the alien they revive has been in stasis for about 2000 years. And we have a healthy theme running through the film of death and rebirth with heavy sacrifice involved in that. Now I ask you what supposedly happened around 2000 years ago that might have got the aliens steamed with us and also involved death, rebirth and sacrifice?
Engineer Jesus is the most stupid theory I seen people come up with.
You aren't just refusing to read more into the story you are also missing large details which they did put in there.
See? That's the problem. The film had maybe four things that it COULD have been, but it jumped around so much, and gave nothing away, that people can read in to it as far as they want to. This in my opinion, does not make it "deep", it makes it sloppy and mishandled.
Except that you miss the fact that Alien is set on LV426, Prometheus is on LV223 - completely different planets. Ridley has been on record as saying it isn't a direct prequel but an exploration of what the space jockeys were about, which it is.
I don't remember saying that the film was set on LV-426. Now you're the one saying what I did and didn't notice. I said that it felt like it was supposed to be a prequel to Alien, as many of the PHYSICAL points were there, but that this was obviously changed at the last minute, hence the superduper quick Engy fight, the facehugger coming back to life and miraculously growing 100x for no apparent reason. And do you think the quick graphic at the start of the film that was the only time the plant was named, was actually finalised before the rest of the film was played out. This would have been done afterwards, when they'd changed their minds.
No, Prometheus is a film that clearly has parts of many storylines incorporated into it, making quite an incoherent mess. When we heard Ridley saying "it's a an Alien prequel", "it's nothing to do with Alien", "it's kind of an Alien prequel", I figured he was just doing misdirection. Now I see that this is what it actually was AT THE TIMES HE SAID THIS. It kept bouncing back and forth between ideas, and we got half a film because of it.
And I'll reiterate: The script and acting (bar Fassbender in the first half) are some of the worst I've seen in a film in a long time. And I watch B-movies for funs.