Prometheus is a good film. Not a great film, but certainly not bad. I don't think that it has much value in youth ministry given how gory it is, but it might be useable with particularly mature groups. Faith is a theme which crops up throughout the movie, as is the origin of life and the threat of violence. Useful fodder, perhaps.

The movie starts off with a rather random sequence which is never really explained, and then quickly moves on to a group of archeologists making a sequence of fascinating discoveries late in the 21st century. They discover that in the artwork of a myriad of ancient cultures there is an image of a star cluster. A cluster so far from earth that the ancient peoples couldn't possibly have known about it. 

That fact, combined with the fact that these ancient cultures had no contact with each other leads the two lead archeologists to believe suspect alien involvement. More than that, they suspect that the aliens are responsible for the creation of life on earth, and so they convince a rich company to get a ship and a crew together together and head out to the distant planet to see what's what.

When they get there they discover that not all is as it should be. The aliens they discover aren't exactly good, and they soon become engaged in a battle to save humanity.

The movie does well at building suspense and generally making you rather scared. It loses inertia about a third of the way through the movie as the story stops progressing at such a fast rate and turns into a sequence of events. It picks up at the end though and wells up toward a fairly good ending.

All in all, a movie worth watching on your night off certainly. Maybe one to use in youth ministry too, but maybe not the really scary bits.

For serious movie fans, you can't review this film without talking about the big white elephant in the room... the Alien movies! Before watching this film I wasn't aware of any link to the franchise whatsoever, other than the involvement of Ridley Scott, but it quickly became apparent that this movie was heavily influenced by them. There's just so much stuff there borrowed from Alien & Aliens: the spooky room full of alien pods, the camera feeds from individual people as they walk around, the flame throwers, the human-looking robot who wasn't all he appeared to be (I called that one about ten seconds in!), creatures bursting out of chests, stasis pods, the uncaring corporation with a hidden agenda, even some of the characters were lifted pretty directly from those created a generation ago - like the Fifield character, who seemed to have a lot in common with Bill Paxton's Hudson. Even some of the shots were pretty much direct lifts!