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…
9. Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Kingdom of Heaven never got a fair shake in the theater. It’s a thing that tends to happen with Ridley Scott’s work on a semi-regular basis. Then, the director’s cut hit DVD and it found new life with the collective reconsideration of the masses. It’s still not a perfect film, and not as powerful as Gladiator, but it is one of the better entries into this subgenre of those Battle Sequence films in the decade following Braveheart.
Orlando Bloom isn’t an ideal leading man as Balian de Ibelin, but the cast around him props him up: Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Edward Norton, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Sheen… the assemblage of talent is terrific, and perfectly fits in the material. Unlike Exodus, Kingdom of Heaven nails down tone and scope and shows off Scott’s world-building prowess once again.
