>I liked Prometheus, btw. This has the same somewhat difficult
>to follow logic behind the sci-fi elements, where you mostly
>get what it's trying to say, but it's hard to know exactly why
>some of the things are happening.

Imho the flaw to Prometheus is that the endpoint felt like for all the weirdness, we ended up in a generic place; a bunch of dudes who made some fucked up weapon that they lost control of. Things needed to be colored in but for the most part the 'aliens' weren't that alien. Annihilation felt continuously weird and otherworldly where the Engineers in Promethus/Covenent couldda just been future humans or some shit.

>This also has some of the issues with seemingly very careless
>decisions being made in the face of an unknown alien
>environment.

It's part of the 'Hey, weird shit is happening and someone's gotta check it out, LETS DIVE IN' sci-fi trope. They didn't seem as dumb as usual and unlike Prometheus the 'wrong' choices felt a bit more logical as opposed to feeding the plot that a bunch of these movies do.

>Characters are too subdued to care much about them, but I was
>engaged throughout, and a lot of the imagery is very
>striking.

This I agree with, (particularly I thought Tessa Thompson's character was a bit too morose even with the explanation they gave which made her arc...meh). But Issacs and Portman killed it, B+ for me, I wanna see it again