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…
13. Hannibal (2001)
Once Jodie Foster turned down this sequel to Silence of The Lambs, the Psycho of the 90s, Hannibal was put behind the eight ball. Anthony Hopkins was still on board, and a solid story was there in Thomas Harris’s novel. But the end result was a film constricted by expectations.
Hannibal is an entirely different movie from Silence of The Lambs. It is action heavy, lacking any of the psychological weight of Jonathan Demme’s classic. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad film. Ridley Scott is aiming to tell a different sort of movie, and it fits since this is a story about Hannibal Lecter on the loose rather than behind that glass wall. Julianne Moore fills in admirably for Foster, and her athleticism plays in nicely to the film’s direction.
And yet, Hannibal doesn’t entirely work. It’s because of the expectations with which it was saddled. That isn’t Scott’s fault, nor is it something in his power to fix. But it nevertheless existed when the movie hit theaters, and while it was a massive hit, the picture has an empty, assembly-line feeling. That being said… that Liotta brain scene is something else.
