How important to you are the answers in a story?

I read an online homage to Ridley Scott's Alien (the original), which has spawned a lot of sequels. In this article that I stumbled upon (in my daily browsing), the author claimed that it is still a perfect movie. I also agree with this statement. However, they pointed out something about its storytelling (that I hadn't quite noticed before) that may be the main reason it is a perfect movie. It sets up a bunch of mysteries and it never resolves them. It also explains that for these same reasons, Prometheus is a failure of a story. It seeks to answer those questions set up by Alien.

So, this was a weird but important take on storytelling that I wasn't prepared for: knowing the answer spoils the story. But in most situations, this seems to be true. In Alien, we are introduced to a crew on some kind of industrial vessel that gets diverted to answer a distress beacon. We later assume that the distress beacon was from an alien vessel, and then the android on the ship ends up being a villain because the company knew that there were creatures on that planet, and the company that built the android wanted a sample brought back to them.

But there are never any answers given in any of that. How did the company know that the alien vessel was on that weird planet? Why did they want a sample brought back? And so on and so forth. As human beings, I think that we are programmed to want to follow questions back until we either come up with nothing, or an answer surfaces and then we can find some level of satisfaction and move on. But in storytelling, it is probably better to have an arc where you set up mysteries and just never resolve them. For example, in Amazon's Open Range you have a big hole in a field that has no bottom and allows people to time travel to different eras if they fall in. Answering the "why" as to this thing's existence just ruins the show. You can't be bothered by "why." It's better to have people just react to the weird thing that makes no sense. This also probably takes a big burden off the author or the "idea creator," because they don't need to know the "why" and the "how." All that matters is that the mystery "is."

I think that this is the genius of the X-Files, and why it worked so well. They had an alien arc that ran across the show's life, interwoven with "monster of the week" episodes that wrapped up nicely in an hour. However, it can also be overdone. Some people (like myself) do get annoyed with shows or movies that continuously introduce more and more mystery without ever fully resolving anything. Lost is probably the best example of this kind of storytelling.

Some people like to refer to this kind of tale spinning as "high concept." As a refresher, high-concept narratives are typically characterized by an overarching "what if" scenario that catalyzes the following events. Jurassic Park and its sequels are "high concept" in that it takes a question of "what if we could clone dinosaurs?" and then proceeds to answer that question. But in my experience, most high concept storylines write themselves into a corner, and then they can't figure out where to go with the story to make it where you care about the characters enough to keep coming back. In other words, it becomes more about the concept that it does the characters. And then they have no idea how to answer all the many questions that pop up in any satisfactory way. The Walking Dead is a perfect example of this. I read Robert Kirkman's explanation of how the zombie apocalypse started and he said that it came from outer space. He decided never to answer the mystery of how the zombies all started, because doing so lessened the story.

So, having said all of the above, I'm wondering: how important to you are the answers in a story? Are you okay with endless mysteries just so long as the present narrative of people/characters dealing with those mysteries is interesting and well-written?