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…
2. Thelma & Louise (1991)
These days, someone like Ridley Scott directing a female-rebellion film might end up being #problematic for the Twitter Police. But his tactile camera and gritty aesthetic balances these two women, who transition from delicate and fragile to dogged and desperate over the span of a few days on the run.
Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon both grabbed deserving Oscar nominations for their incredible performances as two women forced to escape their mundane existence and find out what they’re truly made of, what defines them as women. Scott handles the transition with a mixture of subtlety and moments of serious power. It’s a feminist story, full of incompetent, egotistical, sometimes evil men, but the screenplay from Callie Khouri (who won the screenplay Oscar) allows honest humor and pathos to sneak into the story – elements often lacking in Scott’s work, as he is a director who tends to prioritize world building and plot machinations over the human aspects. Powerful work.
