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…
12. Black Hawk Down (2001)
Black Hawk Down benefited from its release date, as callous as that sounds. The story of a band of soldiers stranded in war-torn Somalia after their chopper is shot down was released in late 2001, at the height of flag-waving post 9/11 America. And audiences ate up this story of heroism.
The cast is a who’s who of names that would soon find their own fame: Josh Hartnett and Ewan McGregor had already made their names, but there was Eric Bana, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, and Ty Burrell scattered among the expansive list of desperate soldiers. But taking a step back from the film, and you can see that its one-note narrative – which had to happen since it was a true story – works against the film’s momentum.
It is compelling at times, often harrowing, but beyond the jingoism lies a film that is a little too repetitive, lacking a discernible personality beyond its military trappings.
