That's actually a pretty fair review.   

I dunno if I would want to see it a dozen times, but I might be tempted to see it another time - if only to see Tom Cruise sing to Malin Ackerman's ass again.

/nope, not kidding.  This movie is genius.

Indeed.    Now run, don't walk, and see The Sting.  Redford and Newman again, same director too.  Completely different movie, but just as great.

Same here.   Religious people give their gods a pass all the time "God moves in mysterious ways", etc.   Even in the secular world, "Act of God" is a legal term meaning something that no one could foresee or prevent - and it's usually something awful.   I'm not a religious person, but I'm of the opinion that if you really could ask your "creator" what the deal is, you might well get an answer you won't like, or even understand.   

For me, the movie dealt with that whole issue in the brief exchange with David about why humans created androids and he gets told "Because we could."   That's what I think the movie wanted to be about, maybe in some former draft.  Almost all of the characters wanted to meet their Maker because of some personal goal  - enlightenment, knowledge, profit, immortality... and watching a variety of interesting characters go about seeking those different goals is a perfectly workable frame to hang a movie on.

Except... they all went about it by doing a lot of silly unmotivated things, and meanwhile there wasn't a single branch of science that didn't get misused and mangled, which was painful.   And in the end, the one character who seemed to have learned something ("We were SO WRONG") then sets out to do the same thing again.   Ptui.

If there's any common theme to the Alien series, it's "leave that thing alone and go home".   There's a character in each movie who says something close to that, and they're always right.      In Prometheus, Geologist Soccer Hooligan Hudson says it, and he's right... but then everything he does after that is inexplicably stupid, just like every other character.    Double ptui.

One of my fave Futurama jokes evar was a little throwaway gag where Leela finds Fry listening to gangsta rap and says "You can sit here listening to classical music all you want, but..."

The contents of Trey's Tweety Feeder do not reflect the opinions of @downinfront or Twentieth Century Fox.

So Red Letter Media is... all of us?

I have.  Would it shock you if I said that Darkest Hour has some nice action setpieces, interspersed with some extremely sketchy science talk?

Spaights also wrote Passengers, which was number one on the "black list" a few years back.   The description said it was about a guy who wakes up to find himself the only conscious person on a sleeper ark ship.   Considering we were getting ready to make Ark at the time, I was curious (and worried - it seemed like everybody was doing arkship stories all of a sudden). 

So I got hold of a copy, and it's actually an interesting premise ruined by... wait for it...  a lot of extremely dumb science.   The descriptions of how the arkship functioned were insane - you'd never design a ship to do any of those things... unless you needed it to do those things to service your shaky plot.  It even had my least favorite trope of all - the "ship's computer" was damaged and malfunctioning.   

Passengers never got made (yet) though Keanu Reeves was attached to star for a while.  But because of its notoriety,  Spaights became a go-to guy for "space" screenplays.   Sigh.

My biggest gripe about Prometheus (biggest among many) was the Old Weyland subplot, which contributed nothing to the movie.    I think it was in the non-spoiler thread that someone asked why hire Guy Pearce to do the whole movie in not-very-good old age makeup... the only explanation I can think of is maybe that "viral video" TED talk is actually a deleted scene, intended to add another level to the "if we can create life, we're like gods" theme that I think the movie was trying to go for, sorta.   It's a pretty elaborate scene to just be a bit o' viral marketing, but I'm just guessing.   

But damn, it sure is a pretty movie to look at.

Well, I just saw half of Prometheus - the theater was evacuated an hour into the movie because there was a bomb threat at the FedEx next door.    Fun.

Got a come-back-anytime ticket that I might use tonight... but I have to say that although the movie is pretty as hell, I'm not exactly dying to find out what happens next.   Nor am I eager to sit through the first half again  - as I said, nice visuals, but every time a character tried to talk all sciencey things got painful.   

In fact, at the point the movie stopped, several sets of characters were doing supposedly sciencey things that made no damn sense at all - gee, I wonder if they're gonna trigger something bad happening?   Wait, don't tell me...

I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction (my recent marathon burn-through of all the Ice and Fire novels notwithstanding).   My preference is usually science or history... or science history.   In that zone, some recent reads that I recommend:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks   Fascinating story of the first human cells successfully grown in culture, they are still being grown today even though the original (unintentional) donor has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all of Henrietta's cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons.    These cells have made millions for pharmaceutical companies... but until the author of the book set out to trace their history, her family never even knew it.   

The Eerie Silence deals with Fermi's Paradox - i.e. if life in the universe is supposedly so common... where the hell is everybody?    Examines many possible explanations of why decades of SETI hasn't turned up a darn thing - from maybe there really ISN'T other life in the universe, to maybe we're still not smart enough to even know what to look for.

And any of Mary Roach's books:  Spook (about the search for life after death), Bonk (about sex), Stiff (about all the weird things we do with cadavers) and Packing For Mars (about the issues involved in long-term space travel) are well worth a read.    All full of bizarre info and - the way Roach writes - funny as hell.

EDIT:  Meanwhile, Lit-o has reminded me Lost City of Z and Zombie Spaceship Wasteland have been on my "gotta get those" list for a while now.   I shall remedy this forthwith.

Not to mention giving us one of the most well-known catchphrases in pop culture.   Even people who've never seen the movie know the catchphrase (unfortunately).

But yeah, it's a very respectable list... except I agree that Cars 2 does sorta stand out as maybe-not-so-essential-after-all. 

We could go on adding movies forever of course - but me, I see a rather sizable hole in the 70's which I would recommend filling with:

The Sting
The Exorcist
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

EDIT:  Gaah, this is like eating Pringles - but seriously, the list is also missing at least two Planets: 
Forbidden Planet
Planet of the Apes (the original, o'course)

Another doc well worth watching (and currently on Netflix streaming): Cave of Forgotten Dreams.    Werner Herzog may be a bit "out there" in his approach to the material, but the topic is fascinating.

While I'm at it, same goes for Grizzly Man.