After all the hype, the leaked scripts, the rumours – is it an Alien prequel? Ridley says no, everyone else says yes. Yet Prometheus turns out to be… well, just another monsters-in-space movie. That’s not the whole story, of course – as sci-fi horror movies go, this is a pretty epic example. But it’s far from the game-changer some had hoped for.

It’s the year 2089, archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) stumble across a pictogram hidden in a cave. Matching it with etchings found across the globe, they conclude that the drawings constitute a star map. And when a dying multi-billionaire (Pearce) agrees to fund a mission, they head out into the cosmos aboard the starship Prometheus to find answers to the questions of life, the universe and everything. What they find is, of course, far slimier and less friendly.

There’s plenty to recommend in Prometheus: the photography is pleasingly crisp and the design is stunning. But its flaws are impossible to ignore. The script feels flat – a few pleasing nods to the original movies aside, the dialogue is lazy, while the plot, though crammed with striking concepts, simply fails to coalesce.

Perhaps more than any other film, Prometheus is reminiscent of Chris Nolan’s Inception: it’s slick, gorgeously designed and scattered with intriguing concepts. But there’s no real power behind it. It will make for a perfectly entertaining night at the movies – but we were promised so much more.