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1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
In a just world, a Ridley Scott epic would not end up at the bottom of this list—but it’s no surprise that the ugliest of Scott’s historically revisionist works ends up dead last. Released to mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus “discovering” the Americas, the film charts his difficult relationship with the Spanish court and the subsequent colonial abuses carried out by him and his successors. Except, in Scott’s version, Columbus (Gérard Depardieu) was mainly a witness to the truly rotten barbarity of European colonialism, rather than a proponent of it. Despite the angelic score by Vangelis and some dazzling frames of “the New World,” the only glimpse of paradise here is from the bliss of the credits rolling.
Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)
For all intents and purposes, Exodus: Gods and Kings is as clunky, boring, and racist as 1492—and thanks to the dark, muddy color palette, it looks far worse. But it triumphs over Scott’s other terrible historical epic for being such a strange, mangled misfire: a cast of recognizable white faces experiment with different degrees of brownface, and in courting a Western religious crowd, the film was denied a release in multiple MENA countries. The most intentional historical reinterpretations are noteworthy: Scott (together with the four credited screenwriters) show the Plagues of Egypt in gruesome, brutal detail, while also offering playful, realistic explanations for each one.
House of Gucci (2021)
Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)
After working for years on Legend, Scott’s next film was much more grounded—a simmering affair thriller about a bodyguard cop (Tom Berenger) and the beautiful rich woman he’s protecting (Mimi Rogers). By the time Legend flopped hard in 1985, this grounded project seemed like a much surer thing—alas, it also underperformed with critics and at the box office. Scott makes ’80s New York look like a glimmering, weeping, concrete majesty, framing Berenger’s cop under strip lights or in shadowy halls to stress the restless loneliness pulling him towards his material witness. But the film never once tries to make its male lead likable, and both the inane love story and the hackneyed thriller plot end up lifeless. One of the most nothing movies of Scott’s career, but after Blade Runner, it’s notable as another instance of broken, brutish cops populating his filmography.
Robin Hood (2010)
Robin Hood bookended a decade of moody, bombastic historical epics chasing the crazy success of Gladiator—after Master and Commander, King Arthur, Troy, 300, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, all the fun had been sapped out of Scott’s Best Picture sword-and-sandal romp. But Scott made an entirely different type of film here: less theatrical or sentimental than Gladiator, but even more cynical of centralized power, with a sharper image and elastic camera moves. But while all these elements are intact in Robin Hood, it’s no fun at all; the film retells the Sherwood vigilante myth by stripping it of all interesting and recognizable details, leaving us with nothing fun and revealing the true limits of grim, grounded historical blockbusters.
White Squall (1996)
In 1961, the brigantine “Albatross” was hit by a sudden “white squall” (a horrifically strong windstorm at sea) and swiftly sunk. The sailing ship was host to college-aged young men taking prep courses while learning to sail under Chris “Skipper” Sheldon, and a number of them perished. 35 years later, Scott turned the memoir of “Albatross” survivor Charles Geig into a teen survival film starring Jeff Bridges as Skipper, and the resulting film is like a producer wanted to recreate all the treacly sentiment of Dead Poets Society but thought it needed to be more traditionally masculine. It’s a half-effective but trite coming-of-age story, and you can tell the meticulous order and mechanisms of life aboard a vessel is more interesting to Scott than the inner lives of the bland characters. No joke, the film is most notable for its impact on the QAnon community.
Body of Lies (2008)
9/11 affected the development and reception of previous Scott films about military campaigns (Kingdom of Heaven and Black Hawk Down, respectively), but this spy thriller was the first time he tackled the War on Terror head-on. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA agent chasing a terrorist in Jordan, aided by his abrasive, controlling eye-in-the-sky surveillance chief (Russell Crowe, who’s much more comfortable in his role than DiCaprio is in his). Body of Lies features much of the technical agility and finesse of Scott’s modern thrillers, but despite some timely observations about the pitfalls of America’s tech-reliant counter-intelligence, the film only feels marginally less heavy-handed and myopic than your average War on Terror thriller from the 2000s.
Gladiator II (2024)
It’s not really clear, 24 years on, why there was a pressing need for a second Gladiator film, especially as this sequel has so little to say. Gladiator II ishonorably unslavish to Roman history (including appearances of soccer, newspapers, colosseum sharks, and a complete disruption of Imperial Rome’s governance) but dishonorably slavish to the first Gladiator film, giving Maximus a legendary status that smothers any chance for Lucius (Paul Mescal), nephew of Emperor Commodus, to have his own arc. Scott’s filmmaking has changed so much since the first Gladiator; his digital efficiency means that Gladiator II is paced brilliantly for a 148 minute film, but feels more empty as it apes the visual and dramatic highs of its predecessor. The gravest sin of this entertaining but disappointing epic is that every actor (except for Denzel Washington as Macrinus, an ambitious slave-turned-slave owner) feels a little out of step, and Mescal’s naturalistic approach to Lucius’s monotonous rage and righteousness gives us little to hang onto–especially compared to Russell Crowe, whose gladiator performance got him a permanent Movie Star seal of approval.
All The Money in the World (2017)
Sure, it may be a bang-average period thriller, but file this one under “narrowly avoided disaster” thanks to the smart decision to reshoot all of Kevin Spacey’s prosthetics-clad scenes as J. Paul Getty with Christopher Plummer—not least because Spacey had just been accused of sexual assault, but secondarily because Plummer is the better actor and those Spacey prosthetics looked awful. Reshooting nine days worth of scenes mere weeks before the film’s premiere is a Classic Ridley Move—responding to a high-pressure challenge with technical prowess and a clear vision of how the finished product will look. Aside from this real-life B-story, this dramatization of the Getty kidnapping is adequate, bluntly scripted but appropriately bitter about America’s consolidation of wealth, featuring a great performance from Michelle Williams (as expected) and a pretty good one from Mark Wahlberg (much rarer). Fun fact: kidnapped heir John Paul Getty III (played here by Charlie Plummer) is the father of actor Balthazar Getty, who appeared as one of the disaffected young men in White Squall.
The Martian (2015)
Ridley spent a lot of the 2010s in space, but his bleak, imaginative Alien prequels far surpass this fun but fluffy extension to the Rescue Matt Damon Expanded Universe. After being stranded on Mars and believed dead by NASA, botanist astronaut Mark Watney (Damon) mounts an ambitious survival campaign, which thanks to original writer Andy Weir and screenwriter Drew Goddard is full of one-liners and internet age wisecracks that carbon date the film to the minute it was released. Scott assembled a slick, smarmy, and sure-footed film, but every time the script hits upon the possibility of true, daunting tension, Watney explains just how he’s going to solve it, sucking the joy of discovery from the story. It’s too clean and glick to linger longer than a single watch.
Napoleon (2023)
23 years after Gladiator, Scott reunited with Joaquin Phoenix for their second collaboration about absolute power eroding a leader’s sense and reason—even if Phoenix threatened to quit both productions. The promise of a longer director’s cut loomed over Napoleon’s release in late 2023, priming audiences to notice where the expansive and expensive French war saga may have been truncated for a theatrical run (Napoleon: The Director’s Cut is available to stream on Apple TV+, running at 204 minutes instead of 158). Napoleon is as textured and off-kilter as many of Scott’s latter historical films (while still feeling like a technically slick and assured beast), claiming to contextualizing the Napoleonic era through his affair with beloved Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), but often settles for an unrevolutionary look at the general’s inadequacies.
Black Rain (1989)
Was Michael Douglas doing anything in the ’80s apart from being sleazy and vulgar? His lone appearance in a Ridley film capped off a difficult decade for the director, full of lavish expressionism but mangled scripts and compromised productions (his best received work in the ’80s was probably his “1984” Apple commercial). This cross-cultural cop film takes rough, dirty New York cops (Douglas and Andy Garcia) to Japan, where a beleaguered Osaka officer (Ken Takakura) helps them chase down yakuza rebels, even though they have very different ideas of police work. Black Rain is one of those clumsy racist cop movies that accentuates all the worst traits of policing but can’t muster any lasting critiques. Still, Ridley’s action sensibilities give us many reflective water pools, looming buildings, and sprays of dirt from motorbike tires, meaning that, for spells, Black Rain is brutal and commanding.
A Good Year (2006)
Straight after his towering crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, Scott made an unlikely contribution to the loose British subgenre of “middle-class ennui” dramedies that picked up in the 2000s, off the heels of About a Boy, a couple Bridget Jones films, and just before the transatlantic house-swap classic The Holiday. A Good Year has a snarkier, bitterer tone than those romcoms, elevating the airport paperback material (originally written by Ridley Scott’s Provence neighbor?!) with sharp performances and a restless (read: overedited) visual style. It’s quite a melancholic story: an unpleasant investment broker (played ably by Russell Crowe) travels to his late uncle’s French vineyard estate to lock down a quick sale, but becomes ensnared in a web of memory that has him fall for a curt French waitress (Marien Cottiard). It’s one of the lightest works in Scott’s filmography, but he is in his element pastiching braindead capitalist men and channeling the boomer urge to have a provincial French estate.
G.I. Jane (1997)
A couple of Ridley films are described as more “Tony Scott coded” by film fans, and this boot camp drama, with its textbook ’90s trappings and liberal shortcomings, is most often cited as being ghost directed by his action maestro brother. The US Navy are strong-armed into trialing female recruitment across all Navy divisions, and in order to make a public failure out of the program, they admit Jordan O’Neill (Demi Moore) into the ruthless, dropout-prone Combined Reconnaissance Team selection program. Every other candidate is treated in a horrifically sexist manner, but wouldn’t you know it, after O’Neill proves herself sufficiently masculine, they come around to her—even if it takes the threat of sexual assault from their strange Master Chief (Viggo Mortensen). Scott is terrific at enhancing the best dramatic beats of a screenplay, so it’s a shame the Libyan coast firefight that closes the film is such a confused dud.
Hannibal (2001)
After Michael Mann’s Manhunter and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Ridley Scott is the last actually talented director to helm a Hannibal Lecter movie. Scott’s continuation of the Clarice Starling story (the part now recast as Julianne Moore) was followed by disgraced hack Brett Rattner (Red Dragon) and British filmmaker Peter Webber (has anyone ever watched Hannibal Rising?) While it would be too much of a stretch to call Scott’s Hannibal “good,” it’s the only one of the three bad Lecter films you could theoretically call “good.” Scott shoots the garish, schlocky material with little of the psychological edge of Mann or Demme’s films, but dials up the overblown, theatrical sleaze without losing all of Hopkins’s Oscar-winning horror gravitas. The Ray Liotta brain dinner finale sums up the film’s creepy and trashy appeal—it’s truly beautiful nonsense.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
An accomplished and influential depiction of modern war on film, Scott’s rendition of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in the capital city of Somalia is nevertheless an ugly account of US interventionism released a couple months after the September 11 attacks. Looking back 23 years later, the film’s selective perspective on Operation Gothic Serpent set the stage for the ensuing decade of how American culture (poorly) reflected on their ongoing foreign policy. About one hundred recognizable actors led by Josh Hartnett (but notably, no Somali actors) dramatize the calamitous urban firefight, and Scott uses a high-contrast color palette and jarring camera movement and cuts (sometimes shooting with up to 11 cameras at once) to trap us in the battle’s immediate peril. But outside of the effective adrenaline of the fight, Black Hawk Down is a more troubling political document.
The Last Duel (2021)
Have you noticed that a lot of Ridley Scott films are critical about French history? Scott’s historical dramas often circle themes of futility and hardship, and this screenplay penned by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Nicole Holofcener turns the punishing misogynistic order of 14th century France into three repeated accounts of an arrogant nobleman (Matt Damon), his more favored rival in court (Adam Driver), and the nobleman’s wife (Jodie Comer) who accuses her husband’s rival of rape. It’s a grueling, sometimes taxing watch about the violence and childishness of chivalric hierarchy, and the Holofcener-scripted third act shakes you awake from the circular, petty squabbles of the medieval men. 30 years after Thelma & Louise, Scott honed in on the maddening injustice women face in the aftermath of gendered violence, this time using his lived-in, mud-caked, and exposed-to-the-elements historical craft to show a real woman’s survival.
Prometheus (2012)
Legend (1985)
When a post-Blade Runner Ridley Scott wanted to make an original fairy-tale film, it made sense to feature a 21-year-old Tom Cruise wearing a shiny, elven chainmail shirt and basically no trousers (a worthy, impractical successor to the sheer costumes of Blade Runner’s android women). Legend is about the Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry) capturing the last unicorn so he can plunge the land into eternal night—and only a forest child (Cruise), a princess (Mia Sara), and a bunch of high-pitched elves and goblins can stand in his way. The film is oozing with sumptuous, sensory production design (not going to lie, it looks like the type of set that would catch fire) and the initial twinkling mood descends into an oppressive, but intoxicating and sensual third act once Curry’s strangely dom devil purrs in impossibly bassy tones. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand what’s happening at any given moment—Legend truly belongs to a dream world that hasn’t been replicated in fantasy film since.
Matchstick Men (2003)
Okay, now let’s do a silly one. Matchstick Men typifies Scott’s skill at elevating pretty much any entertaining Hollywood script, honing in on key themes or moods with formal agility and delivering an ideal (if not always transformative) version of the story on the page. You can see it a lot in his 2000s work—seriously, the range of genres and tones from his Gladiator to Body of Lies run is almost like he tried to make every type of film in a single decade. Collaborating with Nicolas Cage, the king of locking in, Scott made a supremely entertaining, if increasingly outlandish OCD crime caper about an obsessive, compulsive con man (Cage) who meets his teenage daughter (Alison Lohman) for the first time while planning a long con with his partner (Sam Rockwell). Sandwiched in between films set in war torn Somalia and the fall of Christian Jerusalem, Scott confines us to arid Los Angeles apartments and offices, dialing up his protagonist’s neuroses and hypersensitivity for a delicious and smart-mouthed comedy.
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