This movie is mind-blowing, if your mind is open to being blown. It’s a flawed masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece nonetheless. It’s hard for a movie that comes bearing such a colossal weight of expectation to be anything other than disappointing, but some of the negative comments flying around do seem a little petulant – oh, there’s so much CGI (dude, it’s a HORROR movie)...oh, there’s so much reference to other movies (dude, it’s a HORROR movie)...and perhaps more tellingly: oh, it’s not really dramatic enough. Well, no, it’s not, it’s a much more reflective, allusive, resonant, elegiac piece of work. Just go with me with on this for a little. Try to cast your mind back before Alien was such a gigantic game-changing icon of the art of making movies. Think about it in dramatic terms. It’s a relatively simple and essentially conventional plot, an absolutely formulaic horror movie – a small group of people in a very confined environment are stalked and killed by a peculiarly savage predator whose method of reproduction involves a nightmarishly disgusting parasitic violation of its host’s body.

Remember the first time you saw Alien - and (if you were lucky enough to see it in a cinema) the awe you felt when the little away-team got into the alien ship and found the body of the giant space pilot still sitting in his chair, with his chest all smashed open? Who was that pilot and what was his ship doing there? Prometheus will give you some answers - but it will leave you with many more questions too. It isn’t really a horror movie any more, because it has totally climbed out of that box. It’s not relating a simple story but engaging with some huge issues: who we are, how we got here, why were we created, etc. It’s so incredibly rich in its cultural references and its sheer visual splendour that you just can’t mention everything in a review.

So I’ll mention just two things. For the first time, Ridley Scott reveals some of the fundamental inspiration of his vision. Visually and philosophically this turns out to be the art and poetry of William Blake; particularly Blake’s work on the Bible and on Milton's Paradise Lost. The alien we see in the first scenes of the movie is a realisation of the giants, titans and gods who appear in Blake’s paintings, with his calm and noble face, his heavily muscled body and his pearly white skin. He disrobes and drinks a strange, mobile, viscous liquid from a vessel he has brought with him. It causes some sort of catastrophic genetic breakdown of his body; we see him disintegrate before our very eyes and the pieces of him are swept away in the rushing waters of the primeval landscape. Is the alien seeding the planet with his DNA, or unleashing a deadly plague to wipe out what’s already there? Either way he has sacrificed himself for some greater purpose. The themes of sacrifice, of free will, of slavery, all loom large in Blake’s work (and it even features creatures emerging from a dead man’s chest - just Google his painting The Descent of Christ).

Which brings us to what I think is the central dramatic crux of this movie: the decisions and desires of the android David, played with mesmerising restraint by Michael Fassbender. So fierce is the concentration on this character that it does (ironically) make the human characters appear less fully realised, which is a flaw. But David is the key. As we all know, the concept of the synthetic person has always been central to Scott’s vision of a future society; they have played crucial roles in his previous movies, teasing the audience for most of the time with the mystery of their possible hidden agendas. David, like the other synthetic characters, is essentially a slave. He can’t go against his programming and he gets to do all the crappy jobs. The first we see of David is as the ship’s caretaker while its human crew are in cryo-stasis. As he moves about his allotted daily tasks he obsessively watches Lawrence of Arabia, learning every nuance of Peter O’Toole’s delivery and tinting his hair to match Lawrence’s Aryan splendour. He does resemble the young O’Toole here, with his gaunt cheekbones and long, mobile mouth. He clearly isn’t an android devoid of all emotion, as some of the human characters seem to assume (‘Sorry – I keep forgetting that you’re not a real boy’). Right away we can see that he is susceptible to hero-worship; but look what an ambiguous figure he has chosen. Lawrence as portrayed in the movie can be seen both as a hero, a patriot and a principled man, but also as a sociopath who rather enjoys killing people and poking authority in the eye. Given our experience of synthetics in the other films, we have every right to feel highly suspicious of David and his beautifully modulated cut-crystal vowels. He enjoys controlling and manipulating the humans, but at the same time he longs for connection, for validation. I can’t say more without giving too much away.

This is a work of fiery visionary genius, that will keep you replaying scenes in your head for days. Just go.

The initial scenes are breathtaking - we sweep over some of Iceland's most dramatic vistas, in company (as it turns out) with an alien space vessel on a mission.

Much of what follows is dark and claustrophobic, and the parallels with the other films in the series are obvious. Some of the gambits from the earlier films get played through again here - eg. it really is a very bad idea for people to break away from the main group when exploring alien worlds, and androids are never quite what they seem.

Many of the characters - who, given a bit of time and opportunity, might have proven quite interesting - are very thinly drawn indeed, which makes it difficult to care. In fact, having initially been told there was a crew of seventeen on the earth ship, we only hear from ten of them, and I rather quickly lost count of who were the corpses eventually littering the scene; even synthetics can't seem to keep their heads, as seems to be traditional.

Dialogue is a bit insubstantial, and the inter-personal tensions and fears which drive that first film don't really get much space here. In that first film, a bunch of rather frightened people, essentially defenceless, were forced to work together in the face of an unknown threat. Here we get a crowd of disparate characters who don't really connect when the danger is obvious, and we're left feeling they could have done so much better...

This was a startlingly beautiful film - or it certainly was in 3D - which perhaps gets cluttered with too many interesting ideas, and some insubstantial characters, losing impact in consequence. Nevertheless, a thoroughly enjoyable evening at the cinema, but a very different creation from the original Alien. And the more Chopin in the cinema, the better.