This month’s Alien: Covenant marks Ridley Scott’s 24th feature film in what has been a long, influential, albeit uneven and sometimes flat out maddening career. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, Ridley Scott’s oeuvre is as inconsistent in quality as his late brother Tony’s was consistent in aesthetics and tone. He has his strengths – world building and managing epic scope – and his weaknesses – creating three-dimensional characters. These aspects aren’t always true, but they are more consistent than anything in his career.
Digging through Scott’s entire filmography, spanning epic classics and replacement-level thriller dreck, it was tough to try and rank some of the lesser works above the each other. But with careful viewing I began to disseminate just how much effort Scott was putting into his craft from movie to movie. It helped shape a list top heavy with older films and, unfortunately, a heap of Scott’s most recent work filling out the bottom of this list.
Here we go…
14. Black Rain (1989)
Black Rain opened near the height of America’s fascination with Japanese culture and style. And it excels in painting a land which is initially alien to our rugged detective, Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas), and his prickly partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia, the heart and soul until his untimely death).
Nick and Charlie are in charge of returning a rogue Yakuza psychopath back to the authorities in Tokyo, but are immediately duped into releasing him to the gangsters on the tarmac. Douglas’s character is a little racist, and pretty tough to like, but the action here is executed on a tremendous level. Scott is full-on obsessed with recreating the light-and-shadow aesthetic he perfected in Blade Runner and tried again in Someone to watch Over Me, leaning into the noir visuals even more here, and to better effect. This may be the best realization of his rich aesthetic style, even when the story itself flattens out at times.
