Ridley Scott movies ranked – we’ve picked the top 10
Few would have guessed Ridley Scott would remain quite this prolific well into his eighties: there has been absolutely no sense of winding down, still less throwing in the towel. His love of the craft has always been apparent, and indeed, aged 86, Scott is perhaps the living epitome of director-as-craftsman.
It wouldn’t be right to label him an auteur in the traditional sense, because we recognise a Scott film more through technique than re-explored themes. That said, he does have his obsessions, pitched battles being one of them. (He was very fond of Venetian blinds in the 1980s, too.)
It’s as a supreme ringmaster of spectacle that Scott will always be best known, but if you string all his films together, motifs jump out. They foreground money, status, power – being the first, being the best. His biopics are of Christopher Columbus and Napoleon. He shakes an envious fist at emperors, gods, kings, creators. He also loves the instability of the political status quo, whether in Ancient Rome, America’s ganglands, or inside the house of Gucci. There is treachery in everything he’s ever made: no throne is safe.
10. Napoleon (2023)
Scott in ripely spectacular, factually cavalier mode: the more armchair historians complained about blatant gaffes or Joaquin Phoenix’s American accent, the less he cared. A single-minded cinematic campaign, tracing Napoleon’s fortunes from upstart officer to the emperor of France, it works best when it’s genuinely funny – there’s a childishness to the portraiture that lends itself to this, as if we’re dealing with a seething toddler who happens to be a dab hand at military strategy. Vanessa Kirby’s Joséphine gets a little lost in the mix, but Scott’s usual command of set pieces is crisply showcased at Toulon, and especially with the frozen-lake manoeuvres at Austerlitz.
9. The Martian (2015)
“Bring Him Home”. Rescuing a stranded Matt Damon – struck by debris during a sandstorm on Mars, and left for dead – becomes an international priority, though his own is staying alive, cultivating Martian soil using his own waste to grow potatoes. Packing a relentless playlist of 1970s disco tracks – for which we can blame the taste of Jessica Chastain’s mission commander – this high-fiving NASA adventure is groovy and entertaining, light years away from the cosmic gloom of Alien. It’s also flip, facile and had its eyes hungrily on the Chinese market. It all paid off: to date, it’s Scott’s biggest commercial hit, taking $630 million worldwide.
8. The Last Duel (2021)
This one flopped at the box office, though a 2021 release date was no one’s favourite berth, and the story is levity-free, for all the comedy value of Ben Affleck’s bleached goatee. Retelling the real-life story of a medieval bust-up in France, Scott gives us the POV of both combatants – Matt Damon, Adam Driver – then that of a sterling Jodie Comer, wife of one and rape victim of the other. This Rashomon-esque structure should have inserted more contrast, but the judicial intrigue is right in Scott’s wheelhouse, and so is the much-hyped climax: a heaving joust followed by a brilliantly choreographed scuffle to the death.
7. Gladiator II (2024)
We could talk about the void left by Russell Crowe, insufficiently filled by anyone. But once you get past that primary disadvantage, there’s a lot of sumptuous fun to be had: it actually looks much better than the first one did. Screenwriter David Scarpa has done well to make personal vendettas the engine for a story of Rome’s rebirth, even if history (as often with Scott) flies out of the window. Instead, we get rhinos as steeds, sharks in the Colosseum, and Denzel Washington as a string-pulling ex-slave who wants to assassinate literally everybody. All in all, it’s an addictive fantasy scenario, owing as much to Tolkien as Tacitus.
6. Hannibal (2001)
It can’t touch The Silence of the Lambs, so it spoofs it – an approach Thomas Harris left wide open on the page with his wildly baroque sequel. Anthony Hopkins luxuriates as a Lecter in the wild, “Doctor Fell”, in the libraries of Florence. Meanwhile, the race is on: Julianne Moore’s Clarice Starling merely wants him back, whereas hideously disfigured old foe Mason Verger (a terrifying Gary OIdman) intends to feed him alive to ravenous hogs. You can tell Scott’s tickled by the whole business, and so goes for broke with the ghoulish tit-for-tats: Ray Liotta gets his own brains served to him as supper. It has a ravishing perversity.
5. Gladiator (2000)
The crowd shots are blurs, the last third is glitchy – it’s not unimprovable. But Russell Crowe is. He and Scott sculpted a hero for the ages here, lost in unthinkable grief, biding his time. The story has a grand surge to it that borrows, first, from the Odyssey, then re-routes for Crowe’s Maximus to have his vengeance against the puny and morally debauched emperor Commodus (who was actually killed by a mercenary wrestler). Crowe, fiercely believable as both general and wronged slave, wages this comeback with mighty assurance, while Scott enlists Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard to assist with one of the finest scores across his whole oeuvre.
4. The Duellists (1977)
It’s fascinating how many of Scott’s pet themes he laid out for us in his very first feature. Duels. Rampant male obsessions. Unquenchable vendettas. History on horseback – they’re all there. Adapted from a short story by Joseph Conrad, this elegant debut roved around Napoleonic-era France, and keeps testing a quarrel at sword-point. 20 years slip past in the lives of two rival officers played by Harvey Keitel and a never-more-dashing Keith Carradine, as they meet, spar and say au revoir. The film has a painterly precision, like a slimmer cousin to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, intelligently handling a streak of absurdism and futility.
3. Thelma and Louise (1991)
Eyebrows would climb sky-high these days if a director of Scott’s prowling machismo were to take charge of – gasp – a feminist road movie. Yet it remains one of his sturdiest films. He leaves the iconic business up to Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, wonderfully alive in their roles as a pair of dissatisfied pals from Arkansas, on an open-topped escape that goes both wrong, and right, and wrong again. Those clouds over the New Mexico desert; Brad Pitt sizzling in a cowboy hat; the famous ending, such a flex, at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It managed to be a spunky milestone without feeling lumbered with self-importance.
2. Blade Runner (1982)
“Sometimes, the design is the statement.” This is Scott’s reasoning, batting away complaints of style-over-substance that have always dogged him, especially on this film. The design is truly bewitching, and beyond influential: every neon-slicked dystopolis owes a debt to it. The drudgery of the Deckard character is a risky nod to noir, in a genre which usually prefers zapping aliens and whipping out lightsabers. Blade Runner grows and grows – perhaps the older we get, the more we grasp what a limited life-span means, and what these replicants, especially Roy Batty, have to teach us. The “tears in rain” speech, with Vangelis tinkling in mournful understanding, is Scott’s ultimate mission statement.
1. Alien (1979)
Alien is so contained – a hide-and-seek chamber piece, essentially – where the rest of Scott’s filmography sprawls and strides out. It proves his bravura by constricting what he’s able to do and still achieving such shivery magnitude. The ship being a rust-bucket is clever, but every foreign body feels tactile, slimy and organic, something Scott lost when his follow-ups Prometheus and Covenant pulled back and auto-filled the details. This also disproves forever the charge that he’s unfussed about performance, because all seven actors bring an impressive amount of weary personality to proceedings. What Scott achieves with the lonely blackness of space, punctuated by Veronica Cartwright’s unforgettable screams, is the very peak of his prowess.