In honor of Ridley Scott’s new film, The Martian, hitting theaters this week, I decided to look back at his near-40 year career and pick out the man’s best movies. This is tricky because, frankly, Ridley Scott is not a great filmmaker. He doesn’t have a great body of work, but has remained an important director for decades, and that alone says something about what he can do.
Scott’s work is defined by technical proficiency, exotic world-building, and an almost complete lack of compelling storytelling. When it comes to Ridley Scott, less is almost always better. The more complicated his characters or story get, the less convincing his work becomes. But give the man an excellent screenplay and a restricted narrative scope, and he really can do wonders.
He’s a rare director: a perfectly mediocre talent who time after time directs generic, forgettable motion pictures. While putting together this list, it occurred to me that the 10 best Ridley Scott films will include films that I don’t like, don’t understand, or straight up are incomprehensible.
And yet, Scott also happens to have helmed two legit masterpieces. That cannot be accidental, right?
Here are his “best” 10.
10. Gladiator
This was the first pairing of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, and the most successful (though that isn’t saying much cough Robin Hood). The film won 5 Oscars, including Best Director.
Scott makes ancient Rome, in all its dirt and grime, look glorious. Crowe won an Oscar (a shock, given how little he has to do) but Joaquin Phoenix is the real star of this movie. His performance is a blast; Phoenix chews the scenery and wins every scene he appears in. Given the success it had, Gladiator remains a fairly formulaic film, but it does have some life to recommend it.
Gladiator represents the ethic of filmmaking that Ridley Scott adheres to: he’s a serious guy, and he will make serious movies about serious men doing serious things. Rare is the Ridley Scott film that has any levity of style or character or plot (there are jokes, but that’s not the same thing). Seriously serious is the way of Scott, and Gladiator adheres to that ethic with unwavering commitment.
9. Prometheus
Prometheus is possibly the best example of The Ridley Scott Movie. It is beautiful and strange, full of low-light landscape shots and emotionally distant characters. It’s fun and bleak and totally fucking ridiculous. Prometheus makes no sense whatsoever, but if you can get over that little hiccup, then there’s plenty to enjoy.
The Engineer’s are beautiful and terrifying. David the android is a delight; he has a bunch of totally bonkers scenes that add nothing but atmosphere and philosophical mumbo jumbo, but who cares? Damon Lindelhoff can write a pointless scene of fascinating dialogue, and he does it time and again with David. And Noomi Rapace does a bang-up job as the lead. No small task after what Sigourney Weaver has done in the franchise.
Prometheus and Gladiator are pretty much equals in the Scott Canon. Personally, I prefer Prometheus if only because the dour and sour glum of Scott is broken by the charm of sheer wild stupidity. Art contains elements that cannot be controlled, and in Prometheus that element just so happens to be plot.
8. The Counselor
Honestly, I think I hate The Counselor. I don’t get it and I don’t want to. But there’s something going on in this movie that makes it linger in the psyche for, well, forever. Most of Ridley Scott’s films are quite forgettable, and that fact alone recommends the movie if nothing else.
What The Counselor gets right I think we owe in equal part to Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy. Scott’s sensibility and Cormac McCarthy’s uber-vioent source material manage to combine for a movie that is at times gross, and at (most) other times stupid. But it is an original piece of cinema. And when Brad Pitt gets whacked, well, that alone is worth a watch.
7. Matchstick Men
Watching Matchstick Men in 2003 was like stumbling upon a rare gemstone in a city pond. Because it was a comedy, by Ridley Scott. The film stars Nicolas Cage (at Peak Cage, too) and Sam Rockwell as a couple con-men operating short-cons, when Cage discovers he has a 14-year old daughter, played delightfully by Alison Lohman. He takes her under his wing, showing her the way of con-artistry, only to lead to a surprising reveal in the tradition of the best con movies (some compared it to The Sting, which is the only comedy to win Best Picture. You’re welcome, movie trivia players).
A great con movie is always fun, and Matchstick Men really is a terrific con movie. Whether Ridley Scott is responsible for that is an open question, honestly. It’s definitely a break from the Ridley Scott style, which is the best thing possible for a comedy like Matchstick Men.
6. The Duellists
Based on the novel The Duel by Joseph Conrad, Scott’s debut film is a historical period piece set in 1800, in Strasbourg. The Duellists is a weird movie. It has not aged all that well, for starters, coming from an era when period pieces often felt like Americans playing dress-up. The Duellists, for example, stars Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel in a manners-based drama about a prominent dueling soldier and the Napoleonic Wars (let that sink in for a minute: Carradine, Keitel, Strasbourg, 1800).
Despite the casting, or perhaps even because of it, The Duellists works. Scott showcases his ability to capture vivid visuals and landscapes. The technical eye that will define his career is given the debutant’s confidence, too, resulting a sharp, enjoyable film.
The Duellists won Best Debut Film at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, and is a strong first feature from the director.
5. Black Hawk Down
This should be a list of Ridley Scott’s 5 Best Movies. Starting with Black Hawk Down, Scott’s movies elevate from “sort of interesting but” to actual quality cinema. Scott is a technician, and a gunfight in close quarters movie like Black Hawk Down lends itself perfectly to his skill set.
There is not a lot going on in Black Hawk Down, and thank goodness. U.S. Soldiers head into the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, and become entrenched in a battle that will last the entire film. There are some serious cultural issues in the picture; Scott seems to get that this is a complicated political scenario, but he doesn’t have much of a grasp on the Somali perspective.
What the movie lacks in story it makes up for in tension, a skill that Scott learned early much earlier in his genre films and for some reason left behind for 20 years before making this realistic war film. A relentless, unpleasant, bullet-filled survival film, Black Hawk Down won 2 Oscars, for Sound and Film Editing. One problem: Josh Hartnett might be too handsome for his role. It’s a distraction (this is not a problem in the Scott / Crowe relationship)
4. Thelma & Louise
Callie Khouri’s screenplay for Thelma & Louise is a special piece of film writing for which she won a very deserved Academy Award. Khouri’s women are full of bruising one-liners, bravery in a world of men, and silky soft rapport. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon give this movie everything they have, and it really is their work with Khouri’s screenplay that makes Thelma & Louise work as well as it does.
Sorry Ridley Scott. But you’re just not responsible for this one. Thelma & Louise is a very good movie, and the reason that it is not great is Ridley Scott’s commitment to un-fun. There is room in this movie for joy and fulfillment in direction as well as writing, but Scott just can’t find the right tone. He has the ending in mind at every moment, not realizing that in a great road-trip movie the journey is what it’s all about. Also, sweeping landscape photography is great and all but Scott is a little too dedicated to shooting these women from a helicopter.
3. The Martian
Good news everyone: The Martian is really really good. Whew.
The Martian is kind of the movie that Ridley Scott has been waiting for. It has all the elements we’ve come to expect from Scott: the beautiful, harsh Martian landscapes, low lit camera work, a minimalist story that focuses on a protagonist in dire trouble figuring out how to survive. But it combines these elements with true lightness and joy. Matt Damon is funny, and the movie is too.
For more, you’ll have to wait. Our review of The Martian will arrive on Friday. Read our full review here.
2. Blade Runner
If one were to judge movies only upon legacy, then Blade Runner would be considered one of the greatest films of all time. Few pictures have left a deeper impression on the cinematic landscape. Blade Runner was not the first sci-fi noir film ever made, but Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? created a science-fiction aesthetic that remains dominant even thirty years later.
Every time you hear a film described as gritty, your getting Blade Runner kickback. The noir world that Scott creates in Blade Runner combines the darkness of a Fritz Lang sci-fi world with a vision of the future that seems eerily plausible and terrifying.
That the motivations of characters and the machinations of the plot are confusing and diorienting only lends a hand to the achievement. Scott derived a way to give a less is more approach to a complex story that need not be resolved. And the result is a genre masterpiece.
If Blade Runner were the only great film that Scott ever made, he would have a lasting spot reserved among the giants of sci-fi.
1. Alien
Alien is the second film that Ridley Scott directed and it is, objectively speaking, his best film. This is not opinion. There is simply no question.I would argue that Alien is one of the 20 best American films ever made.
The combination of Scott’s technical wizardry and H.R. Geiger’s insane visionary world and creatures is still a breathtaking cinematic experience. Alien‘s combination of horror and science-fiction elements were confronted by the blue-collar crew of the Nostromo, a commercial hauling vehicle. Add Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Ripley, as iconic as it is powerful, and the Ridley Scott style of cinema hits the perfect combination of style, story, and theme.
Somehow a director as mediocre as Ridley Scott was at the helm of one of the greatest films ever made. The movies remain a mystery.
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