"Prometheus" by Ridley Scott (2012)

Thirty-three years after original 1979. "Alien" movie, director Ridley Scott returns to the saga that he initially started. In the meantime both Scott and his brainchild lived highly visible and successful lives - director went from strength to strength with awe-inspiring body of work ("Thelma & Louise", "Gladiator" and "Kingdom of Heaven" amongst others) while "Alien" saga continued under various directors as mega-blockbuster franchise, each sequel moving away from Scott's initial claustrophobic horror vision into high-tech/action/shoot 'em up territory. Even Sigourney Weaver became disillusioned with the whole point of continuation of it. Scott was intrigued with the idea but on his own terms - he would not go for just another sequel, but approach it from different perspective, as a prequel.

Basic idea is similar to rules of "Alien" franchise - spaceship with human population arrives somewhere and is attacked by dangerous life forms - however, Scott is not interested in weapons and pyrotechnic displays but uses the setting to explore the serous ideas like creation of life, faith and parent/child relationship. Best of all, in the thirty three years since the original, technology had improved so much that now Scott is able to use completely different set of weapons on his disposal - movie is stunning visually, both inside of the spaceship and outside in a storm-infected planet. Instead of Weaver, now we have two strong female characters (Noomi Rapace and somewhat underused Charlize Theron) but the main star of the movie is excellent Michael Fassbender as emotionally detached android created to serve his master-programmer and who shows strong intellectual curiosity that keeps the viewer guessing about his real motives. Aliens and facehuggers are fine but personally I was far more interested in relationship between human crew of scientists and mysterious engineers who might had created us as humans (hence the title, its not just the name of spaceship) - were we just an experiment? Did they changed their mind and what made them re-consider it? If they created us, who created them? Is there an omnipotent God? 

Actually - to my biggest embarrassment - I have seen this movie originally in the cinema at the time of its release and promptly fell asleep, how about that. Recently, however I watched "Alien: Covenant" and somehow everything fell in a right place: I got so curious about the whole series that I treated myself with all of them in chronological order, so at this point I was completely primed and stimulated to watch the rest, in fact there was no question about watching this again, I just had to. Now I think it's excellent.