Despite some great sequences and some interesting ideas, last summer’s Prometheus, legendary director Ridley Scott’s (somewhat oblique) return to the Alien universe, remains one of the bigger cinematic disappointments I’ve experienced in many a year (read the original review here).

When I walked out of the theater a few months back after seeing the film, I nonetheless wondered if I would purchase the eventual BluRay release, which I figured would have some cut scenes included.  Surely there was some trimmed cinematic seconds/minutes of material out there that would more fully flesh this sometimes very perplexing film.

Right?

Yet I was on the fence.  Would/could anything “improve” this deeply flawed (to my eyes) work, or would the cut scenes reinforce my feelings that the film was flawed almost from the very beginning and would never become an improved or better work?

Well, the BluRay/DVD was released yesterday and the sale price proved low enough for me to give the BluRay a try.  I immediately put the disc into my machine and moved to the alternate/deleted scenes segment and…

…well…

Sadly, the cut scenes reinforced the later opinion.  The film was always going to be a flawed work, and the sequences that were cut didn’t really add all that much more clarity to the overall product.  I suppose the best of the cut scenes was a sequence that humanized Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers a little.  There was also a longer climactic fight between Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw and the engraged/revived Engineer, but in the end it was wise to trim this down.  It was simply too difficult to believe the injured Shaw would offer that much of a fight against such a bigger menace…a menace that a few scenes before disabled the stronger David in a matter of seconds.

Otherwise, all the movie’s original flaws -again, to my eyes-  remain firmly in place.  I still don’t understand why David spiked the drink.  I can’t understand why Weyland “hid” in the ship…it proved a completely pointless storyline.  The male medical machine, similarly, was an alternately silly and too obvious (look here!  A medical machine…I wonder if it will be used later in the film!?) idea in the end.  If such a machine existed, why would it be designed for men alone?

Then there were the various characters.  Why was Charlie Holloway, Elizabeth Shaw’s lover, so disappointed by what they found?  Sure, they didn’t find living engineers, but they found iron-clad evidence of intelligent life!  Why was he so sour about this?

Jeeze, I could go on and on and on here.

I suppose the bottom line remains as it was before.  Despite some interesting concepts, Prometheus remains a deeply flawed work.  I don’t think there will be a future “director’s cut” that will clarify and improve on what we saw in theaters, at least based on the cut scenes included in this release.  I could be wrong, of course, and perhaps there are a few sequences out there that weren’t included in this release.

Somehow, I doubt it.