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…
19. Legend (1985)
Legend is one of the weirdest films in Tom Cruise’s career, and one of the more peculiar entries in Ridley Scott’s, and for that it at least deserves some sort of faint praise. It is straight-up fantasy, involving a demon who wants to destroy all the unicorns and marry a fairy princess. His only roadblock is a boy from the woods, played by Cruise, and his handful of friends.
So, yeah, this one never caught on the way Scott intended. The story is a mishmash of typical fantasy tropes all thrown together, and Scott’s penchant for low lighting and dark aesthetics don’t match up well with a story about unicorns and forest dwellers and the like. Fantasy films are tough sells, and an original screenplay like this one from William Hjortsberg is even tougher since the story didn’t have a built in book audience. Even if it did have an eager fanbase, they wouldn’t have been pleased with this murky end result.
