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…
17. A Good Year (2006)
Personally, I’ve never understood the derision aimed at this Crowe/Scott joint. It may not be any sort of groundbreaking classic, but there are things to enjoy here. The story, about a jaded investment banker (Crowe) who returns to his childhood home in France, which happens to be a spectacular if run down vineyard, is the perfect setting for what turns into an engaging romance between Crowe and Marion Cotillard, who was his childhood friend when he spent summers there.
A Good Year has lavish scenery, is beautiful at times, if ultimately narratively hollow in the end. The shots of Southern France and the richness of detail are worth seeing for the most part while the story simply moves along, checking the boxes. I will defend A Good Year, to an extent anyway, more so because of the unnecessary criticism it received when it was released than any top-to-bottom quality it delivered.
