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…
21. Body of Lies (2008)
In this journey through Ridley Scott’s career one thing crystalizes: Scott and Russell Crowe tried time and time again to recapture the sort of chemistry and magic they did with Gladiator. And sometimes, it’s worked. But so many other times something has gone wrong, or something has been missing, or the movie itself is such a painful bore that any Russell Crowe performance can’t save it. See: Body of Lies.
Along for the ride this time around is Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the straight man CIA Agent to Crowe’s nebbish double agent… person. He’s mysterious, but it isn’t really that important, because Body of Lies is one of the more nondescript films in Scott’s catalogue. At least Exodus has personality. This is a film whose plot points have, over time, begun blending into other middling geopolitical spy thrillers that were popular in the mid to late 2000s. Only this one is cripplingly uninspiring in the visual department to go along with such a forgettable story.
