This is because all great movies are walking a razor's edge, and just one step in the wrong direction will send you plummeting into the darkest depths of absolute stupidity. That means that in some alternate universe ...

There are good movies and bad movies, and then there are those weird hybrids -- bad movies that seem to have a great film trapped beneath the surface, struggling against the constricting binds of Hollywood mediocrity like a majestic eagle that has accidentally gotten tangled in a discarded pair of fishnet stockings.

5 Prometheus Was a Straight Alien Prequel That Actually Made Sense

20th Century Fox

Prometheus is probably the biggest sci-fi letdown since the last time someone made a movie set in the Alien universe. Instead of a worthy follow-up to the best sci-fi action movie ever, we got an attempt at a stand-alone plot that wouldn't have even happened if the characters weren't stupid enough to pet alien snakes, get lost in tunnels that they themselves had mapped, and take their helmets off on an alien planet most likely so full of dangerous microbes that they'd be shitting their intestines out within the hour. Seriously, they're like the dumbest scientists ever.

20th Century Fox

"I found something that looks like chocolate! Let's lick it!"

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And beyond that, the plot winds up being just a disjointed series of scary situations with no rhyme or reason, from the deadly black goo that is never explained to the ship's android randomly turning evil, just because.

But maybe the weirdest thing of all is that clearly the film is intended to be an Alien prequel -- the finale of the movie literally leads up to the plot of Alien. A horseshoe-shaped ship crashes with an alien sitting in the cockpit, landing in the exact same position as it is discovered by the crew in the first Alien film. "But wait," they say, "this isn't the planet they landed on in Alien known as LV-426. This is LV-223, a completely different planet. It just so happens that this planet has an identical bit of wreckage and a nearly identical species of alien on it. Makes perfect sense, really." It would be like if, at the end of Revenge of the Sith, it turned out that Anakin had actually been turning into a completely different guy who was also named Darth Vader in a neighboring galaxy.

Lucasfilm

Actually, that might be a best case scenario.

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The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:

Prometheus was just one or two rewrites away from greatness -- but not in the direction you think. An earlier draft by John Spaihts called Alien: Engineers was in fact a straight Alien prequel that, yes, took place on the same planet and could easily have been one of the best movies in the series (or at least something that wouldn't have made audiences want to reach into the screen, grab each character by the shoulders, and violently shake them until they stopped being stupid).