THIRTY-three years ago, Ridley Scott’s “Alien” became a cult extra-terrestrial fantasy horror hit.

Spacecraft Prometheus is on a voyage in 2093 to explore where man has never gone before. Purporting to tell the backstory to “Alien”, “Prometheus” is reverse storytelling in which a bad-mannered creature gestates inside the body and eventually pops out to do terminal harm to humans.

Science fiction is a legitimate diversion from reality, but in pursuing what is at best a plot of limited imagination down a well-trodden path, “Prometheus” insults our intelligence.

In one of the film’s collection of proven improbabilities more than two centuries after Darwin and massive paleontological discoveries, chief scientist Elizabeth (Noomi Rapace) concludes that the team’s discoveries on the unnamed planet have links with the origin of humanity. Where, we must wonder, did she get her PhD?

Elizabeth is brave and stubborn, exemplified by a five-minute, high-tech caesarean she performs on herself to deliver a cephalopod-like foetus, before putting on her space-suit and resuming duty.

I can accept monsters doing things beyond human capability, but I baulk when a film, however fantastic, asks me to take seriously stuff like this by a human protagonist whose academic achievements should have taught her better.

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