@tallTuck94: Leaving out the sense that it answered questions in Alien that didn't need answering, and doing so unsatisfactorily, which I think is where a lot of the hate comes from, there are a few complaints that I personally would make about it, and I've seen other people make:
a) It's really bitty: Threats are introduced and never really come to much. This I suppose might be in part an attempt to measure it up to alien (which I wanted to try not to do), which had one concrete threat which existed at all times through the film, even as it elicited other crises around it. But even without measuring it against Alien it just makes for a slightly unsatisfactory viewing experiences. There are some admittedly brilliant set-pieces which feel slightly hollow because they seem to be there out of a need to have something happen, rather than any definitive forward movement of the narrative. In part this is a problem with....
b) the fact that Scott feels far more interested in discussing moral philosophy than telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of RS' other work, and I realise that philosophical questions have been at the heart of a lot of his movies, but usually more subtextually. In this, it seems to be the thing that was written first, and the rest was slotted in around it. Every conversation is laden with philosophical hand-wringing and socratic dialogue of some description. It's not on its own uninteresting, but coupled with the lack of a consistent, constant threat it makes for a fairly staid film. It also contributes in part to...
c) really awful dialogue. This is perhaps a more overtly subjective statement than the others, I suppose, and even if there was some qualitative measurement we could apply, everyone would have different tolerances for it at different moments. But for my money, it's hard to be invested in characters who never talk like any human being I've ever met. My go to example is when they get the mission briefing from holo-guy pearce. He mentions that they have David, a prototype android. "David doesn't feel human emotions," he tells us helpfully, presumably because the writers assumed (not foolishly) that we are not all invested in debates about the sentience of machines. But is that really how you would introduce a robot crewman? It's so blunt and irrelevant to the situation that I actually laughed in the cinema. Or snorted with surprise, at least. It's not just moments like that though. Its the moments in the dialogue which feel the need to underscore their own importance and in the process insult the viewer's capacity to understand film as a medium in general: A character tells Noomi Rapace that the capacity to create is basically divine. "What does that make me?" she replies, the fairly obvious import of which is that she is infertile, as I think anyone with ears understood...."I can't have children" she continues, in a great moment of "both these characters knew that information and probably understood that it was to her infertility she was referring without having to spell it out." Similarly, Charlize Theron acts her face off to deliver a stinging, full of repressed rage delivery of the line "father" while the score helpfully alerts us to how shocked we should be with a stab of strings, even though it seems like a weird thing to say and we'd all guessed that Guy Pearce was her father about half an hour ago when she bickered with David.
Please don't think I'm putting you (or anyone else) down for liking it. I did think it was an enjoyable watch with a lot to recommend it. Those are just the things I think could be considered the most justifiable bases for "hating" the film.
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