Netflix has just added a brilliant underloved sci-fi movie

While the film may have confused audiences upon release, it has aged extremely well.

The movie saw Ridley Scott, the director of the original Alien, return to helm the project. The film garners its title from the Greek myth of Prometheus, the god who was punished by his fellow deities for stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity.

Set in the late 21st century, the sci-fi centres around Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace, The Drop), an archaeologist who uncovers a star map in a Scottish cave with her colleague and boyfriend Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green, Upgrade).

A deeply religious person, Elizabeth believes the map is a guide for humans to meet an advanced race of beings that came before us and perhaps created us: Gods, if you will.

Receiving funding from shady elderly CEO Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce in old age make-up), Charlie and Elizabeth assemble a crew on the spaceship Prometheus and lead an expedition to the distant moon shown on the map.

After landing on the distant moon and exploring an artificial structure found there, the expedition goes horribly, horribly wrong.

If you think this setup for Prometheus sounds a lot more complex than any of the other main Alien movies, where Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley would join a space crew but get targeted by disgustingly fascinating Xenomorphs every time, you'd be correct.

Co-written by Damon Lindelof (The Hunt, The Leftovers, Lost) and Jon Spaihts (Dune: Part One and Two, Passengers), director Ridley Scott first met up with the latter to discuss working on a potential Alien prequel.

While Scott enjoyed the draft of the script Spaihts turned in, both he and Lindelof, who was later brought into the project, felt that it relied too much on elements from previous Alien films. This is something the director wanted to distance himself from, out of fear that he would be repeating himself.

As such, Lindelof was tasked with crafting a more original story, something that could include elements of Alien but not overly rely on them.

Speaking about this on The Kevin Pollak Show, Lindelof explained:

Indeed, this approach leads to much of what is thrilling about Prometheus. While the prequel does boast some of the phenomenally executed monster movie thrills of Alien and Aliens - the scene in which Elizabeth has to perform emergency surgery on herself is indeed one for the ages - much of the blockbuster is tackling deeper, more philosophical and hard-to-answer questions that continue to resonate.

Where did humanity come from? If we could ever meet our makers, what would we ask them? If we can now create artificial intelligence like David (Fassbender, giving arguably his best performance as the enigmatic, scheming android), are we ourselves not gods in a sense?

On top of this, the movie has a completely different visual aesthetic from the Alien movies. Perhaps this was a way for Scott to move further from what came before and also a method of signifying to audiences that Prometheus takes place in a near-future when space travel was still relatively new - a contrast to the original, where Ripley was part of a crew of essentially space truckers.

Gone are the tight, dark, smoky, industrial interiors of the 1979 movie in favour of more wide-open, colourful, bright, sleek spaces that look absolutely stunning.

Honestly, it's only in its closing moments that Prometheus' main connection to the Alien series is properly explained, which, in hindsight, is very effective but may have been a bit of a hindrance upon release.

While Scott and the film's trailers tried to downplay the prequel's link to the rest of the franchise, news of the blockbuster's development basically let the cat out of the bag.

As such, there were audience members who showed up to theatres fully expecting a new Alien movie that were bound to be disappointed, leading to a slightly muted reaction upon the sci-fi horror's release.

While Prometheus was a box-office success - grossing over $400 million - reviews for the large part were only mixed to positive.

One imagines that this made producers slightly wary as to whether there was enough of an appetite for a straight-up Prometheus 2. We instead got Alien: Covenant in 2017 - a sort of half Prometheus prequel (Scott and Fassbender returned, while Rapace makes a brief appearance) and half more standard Alien slasher.

Perhaps, if Scott could have pulled off the trick M. Night Shyamalan did in making his thriller Split a secret sequel to his earlier film Unbreakable, Prometheus would have been more beloved upon release.

All this being said, as we move further and further from the burden of expectations placed on the 2012 blockbuster ahead of its release, the more it stands beautifully as its own daring, exciting and intelligent achievement - the type of big swing you wish Hollywood would take more of a risk on going forward.

Prometheus is streaming on Netflix and Disney+ now.