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…
18. Someone To Watch Over Me (1987)
Ridley Scott’s venture into adult thrillers began with Someone To Watch Over Me, an inauspicious left turn from the fantasy and sci-fi worlds on which he’d made his mark. Tom Berenger plays a salt-of-the-earth New York detective with a loving but ordinary wife (Lorraine Bracco) tasked with protecting a Manhattan socialite (Mimi Rogers, who should have been a bigger star) after she witnesses a murder. Of course, the two characters from opposite ends of the Big Apple social spectrum fall for each other.
The film is less concerned with the thriller elements and more interested in the budding romance. And the dichotomy of their lives is hammered home consistently. The only problem, then, is the lack of chemistry between Berenger and Rogers. They are fine in their parts, but the sparks don’t ever truly fly enough to elevate this beyond some sort of standard 80s movie-of-the-week fare. Scott’s love for stark contrast between light and dark is heavy handed, and the plot is all potboiler and no vitality. It could have been worse, but it certainly could have been better, too.
