Nothing could possibly satisfy the fervent expectation that has built for Ridley Scott's sorta-prequel to his genre-defining "Alien" but "Prometheus," the director's return to science fiction for the first time in 30 years, comes close.

Strikingly beautiful, expertly paced, vividly detailed and scary as hell, it holds you in its grip for its entirety and doesn't let go. You'll squeal, you'll squirm — at one point, I was curled up in a little ball in my seat in a packed screening room — and you'll probably continue feeling a lingering sense of anxiety afterward. That's how effective it is in creating and sustaining an intensely suspenseful mood.

The performances are excellent, especially from Michael Fassbender as a robot with the looks and impeccable manners of an adult but the innocence and troublemaking instincts of a child. His character, the genteel, fair-haired David, serves as an homage to Scott's own work as he calls to mind Ian Holm's android Ash from the original "Alien."

His eerily calm, precise demeanor also is reminiscent of the HAL 9000 computer program in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and the pop-culture influences that shape David's habits and speech are a clever celebration of the power of classic cinema in general.

David is part of a crew of space explorers traveling to a remote moon on a trillion-dollar mission in the year 2093, hoping to find answers to nothing less than the origin of mankind on Earth. (Don't they know they should have been looking in central Texas? That's where Terrence Malick searched in "The Tree of Life.")

Noomi Rapace, star of the original "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" films, continues to forge a strong screen presence as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, a scientist who has managed to find a balance between her religious faith and her work-related discoveries. She and her boyfriend, the more spiritually skeptical Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have found signs in spots around the globe that aliens visited tens of thousands of years ago and left us an invitation to swing by and say howdy whenever we had a chance.

That's what they think, at least.

When all the crew finally awaken from their two-year sleep and arrive at this gorgeously severe land, they (naturally) stumble upon secrets and perils they never could have imagined. Some of them are gooey. That's about all we'll say about that because you really should experience it all for yourself.

But the paranoia becomes palpable, and a lot of its impact comes from how dramatic and dazzlingly seamless the special effects are. Scott makes crisp, immersive use of 3-D in "Prometheus," providing encounters that would seem too close for comfort anyway with a nerve-wracking sense of claustrophobia.