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…
11. The Duellists (1977)
A story about duelists, dueling for decades. Ridley Scott’s first film showed off the scope he could handle visually, and was elevated by performances from Keith Carradine, Harvey Keitel, and Albert Finney.
Taking place during the French Napoleonic Era, the story is about manners amid war, about Carradine and Kettle trading insults, then spending their life squaring off against one another. The Duellists is a peculiar film, an historic epic in a time when these sort of films were put on the back burner for indie fare and the rise of the blockbuster. But it was enough to propel Scott on a four-decade career.
