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…
1. Alien (1979)
What can be said about Scott’s second feature film that already hasn’t been covered ad nauseum? An amalgamation of a handful of science fiction classics, Scott and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon took previous ideations and spun them into something incredible, something horrifying, and something just about perfect.
Aside from H.R. Giger’s legendary creature creation of the xenomorph, Alien grabs the audience partly because of the characters. These are blue-collar space workers, not brilliant astronauts and scientists. Their everyday, workmanlike approach to the horrific infestation is an endearing aspect of the picture brought home by tremendous work from Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and the rest of the Nostromo crew.
Scott opts to keep the action guarded and lean into the claustrophobic mystery and jump scares which are still incredibly effective. The evolution of the creature helps the tension build, keeps the audience off balance, and allows for true catharsis once Weaver’s Ellen Ripley bests the beast. It remains Ridley Scott’s most powerful, complete film.
