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…
7. The Martian (2015)
We are always saving Matt Damon, aren’t we?
Scott had a return to form with The Martian, his adaptation of Any Weir’s near-perfect novel about a botanist stranded on Mars and forced to survive using his intuition and his ability to plant potatoes with poop.
I personally never fell in love with The Martian the way so many people did. The film is fine, compelling at times but oddly flat at others. The moments of dramatic power sometimes don’t resonate, at least they didn’t with me the way they did in the book. But it’s still incredibly well made. And Scott manages to craft an inspirational story about the world coming together, a notion which seems as foreign as the red planet on which Damon’s character finds himself stranded.
