Ridley Scott is not an auteur; it's somewhat silly to talk about a "Ridley Scott" movie, because he does not write his own scripts or consistently work with the same people. He's a gun for hire and an ex-cinematographer. He cares about how a movie looks, not so much what it means or what it feels like. His visual style is great, but if you ever listen to him talk about his movies, and what he thinks people are feeling or what he thinks the themes are, you realize quickly that he's not very bright when it comes to non-visual thinking.

The author of Prometheus was the author of the first couple of seasons of Lost, someone notorious for throwing a bunch of open-ended half-baked sci-fi and philosophical ideas at the screen, never resolving or connecting them, and hoping people are distracted enough by one or two that they mistake it for "deep" instead of "sloppy." (He was fired, but I stopped watching Lost before they got around to firing him. I did not consider the show salvageable.)

I think a lot of people were blown away by the effects, which feel more real than a lot of what we've been seeing lately by virtue of being practical instead of computer generated, by the presence of very good actors you want to trust, and by the desire to see spacefaring sci-fi, which has been thin on the ground. I also think there's an "emperor's new clothes" aspect where no advanced critic wanted to say "this didn't make sense" and be called stupid.