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…
16. The Counselor (2013)
If ever there was a fool-proof cocktail for a truly great movie, it would have been a film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Cormac McCarthy, starring Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, and Cameron Diaz. But holy hell did things go wrong in some bizarre and bewildering ways. Four words: car-on-woman sex.
The Counselor was a frustratingly weird and detached thriller with one of the better metaphors of all time: the McGuffin traveling across California in a truck full of shit. The screenplay from McCarthy has many of the author’s terrific rhythms, but it doesn’t fit as well on the screen as it does on the page. The structure is disjointed and the choppy editing doesn’t help the flow at all. But, with that being said, the last couple of years have worked in The Counselor‘s favor.
This is never going to be confused for a great movie, or one of Scott’s better works, but the gonzo insanity of the story is pretty fun to watch nowadays. Bardem’s wacky hair and outfits, Cameron Diaz having sex with a car, Brad Pitt doing all those Brad Pitt things with his weirdo cowboy character don’t really work, but it’s a blast to see these great talents give such a bizarre story so much effort.
