Unfortunately, it's not. 

Prometheus is visually stunning, there's no question about it, and has some of the very best 3D I've seen, even comparing quite favorably to the gimmicky 3D James Cameron used in Avatar. The story is epic, and revolves around one of the most fundamental questions we humans have, something that goes back as far as we have told stories: who are we and where did we come from?

The problem is that there's insufficient narrative thread to weave together everything that happens in the film, and much more importantly, there are a large cast of characters who are generally inexplicable. Why are they doing what they're doing? Why do some characters, like tough guy Fifield (Sean Harris) change personality halfway through the film? Android David (superbly played by Michael Fassbender) is perhaps the most inexplicable of all. With an obvious nod to the malevolent computer HAL from the great 2001: A Space Odyssey, David behaves in ways that were frequently baffling.

The film opens in the mid 21st Century with anthropologists discovering cave paintings in northern Great Britain, paintings that share common elements with others discovered throughout the world. But the civilizations never interacted: how can the paintings have similar elements? Putting the clues together, they identify a far distant planet in another galaxy, a planet that has an Earth-like atmosphere. Is that the origin of mankind?

The spaceship Prometheus is built and its crew, other than David, is kept in stasis. When they awaken in a ship with clear visual nods to the Nostromo from Alien, we meet lead scientists Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), along with the detached corporate representative Vickers (Charlize Theron), Prometheus captain Janek (Idris Elba), another dozen or so crew members and even a holographic elder statesman and mission sponsor Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, wasted in a role with so much prosthetics).