I kind of feel like Ridley hasn’t slowed down or tried as hard on any of his films since his brother died. Seems like he’s running from his grief. Even in a recent interview for gladiator 2 he’s stated that he misses his brother.
For me he's really just old and impatient. He just want to made as much as he still is able to. Hence "we can fix it in post production". Done, go next basicly.
you guys got it wrong, Ridley is being forced to use writers that he doesn't want and forced at least 3 woke writers, that's why his movies are low quality in that regard. His movies look worked on and very competent, which is why I want him making more movies until he dies, even if they are not masterpieces.
Whatever his faults, Blade Runner has haunted me since I saw it upon release, on a week night, in an empty theater. It became the very definition of the future for me at the time. Still feels that way sometimes.
I find it interesting that with the myriad of intellectual reviews of BR, I've not heard anyone talking about the implications of genetic engineering. You have a character making his own "living" friends, not to mention some of the other oddities that are dotted in the background of some scenes like a unicorn. JF Sebastian's plight is kinda messed up, but, he doesn't make it into reviews of the film. The future really could get grim if that becomes a reality.
The thing is, even Blade Runner showed that he didn't always understand the implications of his own films - giving the replicants eyes that glow when the light hits them just right makes for some beautiful shots, but it's also a way for the audience to consistently spot a replicant just by looking at them. In a film where a key theme is humanity meeting its technology in the middle, as the machines get ever more life-like and the humans get less and less so - to the point where we spend most of the film with Deckard and we still can't tell if he's a robot or not from his behaviour - this is missing the point.
@@Talisguy I get where you're coming from but I think that some amount of difference between humans and replicants is to be expected from a story perspective too. Remember that the Voight-Kampf test is very much real to tell the difference, and weeds out the replicant in the opening in a couple questions. Or do you mean that the eye lighting is too obvious in-universe?
I'm just going to start listing movies: Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator, American Gangster, Thelma and Louise, Kingdom of Heaven, The Martian, Prometheus, Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, the Last Duel, Napoleon (yes, the directors cut is actually good) Stop this nonsense, he's got one of the best bodies of work ever, period
@@natedogg890 you've missed my entire point. He's a great _visionary_ but no one who knows what a good story is would have made Someone To Watch Over Me, Black Rain, 1492, White Squall, GI Jane, Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Vatican, The Counselour, Exodus, Covenant, or House Of Gucci. And when he's working with good material, he makes those great films you mentioned. His terrible films always look great - which I'd argue blatantly demonstrates his strengths/weaknesses.
@@zsht Prometheus, Covenant, GI Jane, Watch Over Me and Black Rain aren't "terrible movies" they aren't even bad movies, I'd honestly rather rewatch those over 90% of the slop being put out on streaming today. Saying Ridley Scott has a terrible eye for writing is like saying James Brown had terrible lyrics. The fact that Scott can make a watchable, stylish movie in his sleep and that James Brown could make a hit song using like 10 real words is a feature, not a bug.
@@natedogg890 We are never going to find an amiable middle ground in our opinions if you think those movies are good. I love many of Ridley's works, but that doesn't blind me to the absolute slop he's also made, and in every single one of those cases, the screenwriting is the issue.
@@zsht I didn't say they were great, but they are all very watchable, Prometheus and Covenant even flirt with greatness at times. Could the writing have been better? Yes. Given that we have so many absolute classics from Scott, I don't really care if some of the others range from just "good" to "kinda bad". I don't really care if our options find compromise, opinions have no value anymore, I don't know if they ever did.
The Biggest Sin of Gladiator 2 is that it's a lesser version of Gladiator. The entire story is the same as Gladiator except they split Maximus' backstory into 2 characters.
The fight scenes in Gladiator 1 were really abysmal: fast cuts, shaky camera's, sub par choreography. For a film where fighting is one of the key parts, that is really unforgivable. At least that was much better in Gladiator 2. Also the whole cheesy melodramatic heaven stuff in Gladiator 1 ("You will meet them again, but not yet..." | "Go to them... You're home...") was toned down in 2. And so only for those two things Gladiator 2 is the better movie.
My father worked with Ridley back on the 1st Alien & the man was near full blown bonkers back then. The guys who were on set were all starting to have just about enough of Ridley cos of the stress & working on the repeatative ships 'tunnels'. Ridley went mental one day & randomly punched straight through the ships ceiling smashing a great hole in my dads newly finished job. The film crew all had t-shirts printed up the next day with some insinuating comment towards Ridley though Ridley defused the situation by having his own T-shirt made up with a light hearted comment printed on. Ridley actually talks about the incident if you listen to his'Making of Alien' interview.
Blade Runner is my favourite movie, and the more Scott films I see the more I think the whole movie was a "Happy Accident". Vangelis was 50% of the soul of that movie...just like Zimmer was the soul of Gladiator.
absolute rubbish, Gladiator is a masterpiece without Zimmer,much like Gladiator 2 is,as is American Gangster, as is Columbus film,as is Napoleon last year,as is A Good Year,as is Alien and many more, he is great. Kingdom of Heaven is highly underrated. Robin Hood was amazing
I think you are right..P.K. Dick, Sid Mead, Harrison Ford, Rodger Hauer in Blade Runner ... H.R. Giger , Ron Schusett, Dan O Bannon, Ron Cobb and Sigourney Weaver in Alien.....and of course the sound tracks...John Williams and Vangalis.. all happy accidents and real reason for these works of art!
Ridley's films are hit and miss, but when they hit, they hit like a batter ram. I met Ridley. One of the nicest, most down to earth people I've ever met in the biz. He's extremely professional and levelheaded.
I love the narrator suggesting his films look so different to each other! They do not; they look identical and have done for many years as he keeps using the same technicians over and over and over and over again. The only standout films of his are his first three and I'd toss in Hannibal. He may well be a worse producer than director as the films he produced are generally poor and may well have been instrumental in killing the alien when no one else could!
I think you are spot on when considering his 87 years and that he is haunted by time. No one lives for ever, and that is a feeling increasingly felt with age.
absolute rubbish, Clint Eastwood and others have no such issues,and he is much older than Ridley. Gladiator 2 was excellent,just as first film. What are you blabbering about?
You have to remember that before he began his film career, Scott directed over 2000 television commercials. Being a workman director is exactly what commercial production is like. I would imagine that that is where his filmmaking attitude came from. I would rather watch a crappy Ridley Scott movie than any one of a dozen movies that pass for what’s number one at the box office these days.
@@MadsterV obviously Alien was not released in what I refer to as "these" days, as in now. I've yet to see Exodus. My point was Ridley Scott's work, rushed or not, outshines a lot of what is in theaters today. By that I mean the year 2024, not 1979 when Alien was released ;-)
@@TheGreatestJediOfAllTime Alien isn' a "good" movie. It is master piece. Calling his five best movies "good" is just so dismissive of his work. The hyperbole is tyring. He's made a bunch of disappointing movies after the turn of the millenium but exceedingly few of these movies could be called "trash" by anyone with a shred of nuance. That was the point of the original comment. Gladiator 2 isn't perfect by any means but it's still a "good" movie.
I agree 100%. I've followed Scott's career over the decades and I have similar thoughts on why his career has been so uneven. His first three proper films (The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner) are pure gold, but his films these days are pure crap. I have a real love hate relationship with this guy
Click bait video. The Martian was a good film. As well as Thelma and Louise. I think Kingdom of Heaven is very good. As for Napoleon, I watched the Director’s Cut and I think it’s a very good film.
Ridley is just a master *CRAFTSMAN* ; his technical abilities are almost unparalleled. But he has always depended on the right creative collaborators to work with him. ALIEN was ALIEN because of his collaborators--Scott didn't do everything whole cloth. He hasn't had the right creatives working with him the last several years. With PROMETHEUS, he used 2 separate screenwriters instead of sticking with 1, and the 2 storylines weren't merged well at all. I'm still convinced that Fox destroyed ALIEN COVENANT and Scott just rolled with it to save his job. I think he's just trying to do too much and not having the right people do the work he can't do himself.
I remember many years ago Fox posted online a series of interviews with filmmakers, and one of them was Ridley Scott. In one segment he basically explained his changing attitude to suddenly becoming very prolific. He talked about how he used to agonise over which movie to make. But then he had a moment where he literally said to himself: "Just f**king do it..."
he plows on one after another BECAUSE he's almost 90. he's working like a man who sees the clock ticking. what he does is make movies. and he wants to do as much of what he does as he can. considering that the studios seem to be happy to foot the bill, let the man play with his train set, i say.
One of the most arrogant men alive. I think the Martian was probably the last really decent movie he made. I'm not really interested in anything he's doing.
He should have been stopped a decade ago. He killed the Alien franchise, even with the just ok Romulus. He was a brilliant talent but he lost his edge and vision many years past. He's been living on previous good reputation for the same amount of time.
Please, the alien franchise was dead by the time they did Alien Resurrection. And when they greenlit those godawful Aliens vs Predator films (some things should REMAIN in bad comics only) you know they didnt care anymore and just wanted to earn a "quick buck" with the dregs of comicbook fandom. We still got hordes of drooling chimps asking "where do Predators fit in all this?" for every single Alien film as if that was the plan from the very beginning. Unbelievable. It was already dead long before he did Prometheus. He failed to ressurect it. Understand??
Duellists - - Every shot is an oil painting. I've calmed down a bit but when I first discovered that gem I'd watch it twice back-to-back every time I watched it. When it was over I was salivating to get it going again.
Not only is The Duelists visually amazing, but it's also very historically accurate, specially the fencing/sword duels. Something Scott doesn't give a toss anymore in his so-called ''historical dramas''.
You nailed it with the observation that RS apparently has no idea of what makes his greatest films timeless and unique. "Alien" is relentlessly focused, claustrophobic and almost tactile in its atmosphere; the prequels are dumfoundingly slick and stupid. AND pretentious on top of that.
I found "House of Gucci" (2021) quite haunting after the second watch, and would watch it again despite not being interested in the world of fashion. It's about the relationship between the heirs of the famous Italian family business, a key marriage and the real-life murder that brought it to its knees. Stars Adam Driver (a Ridley favourite) and the very watchable, seething Lady Gaga are ably helped by a magnificent soundtrack. I think a lot of Ridley Scott's films come alive when watched more than once. Without having to worry about the plot, the sumptuous visuals and atmospheric soundtrack allow details of what the characters are going through to fully emerge.
IMO a few things are in play: 1) If Scott stops making movies, he has to think about his life... and loss. 2) Studios want to make sequels to his work with or without him, so he's decided with him at the helm (kind of like Harrison Ford playing Indy one last time instead of having the role re-cast and continue without him). 3) He's trying to solidify the financial position of his family prior to his death. I've seen all of these aspects in Hollywood so feel pretty confident they're at play with Scott. He's certainly not currently making films to solidify his reputation (they aren't helping that) or because he's passionate about the projects (it's clear he's not).
The only reason why we think of Scott as a great director is because he had epic crews to work with with amazing actors, set designers and DPs. That age of moviemaking is gone, everything is lazy and generic and everyone is on autopilot now, so he doesn't have absolute legends like Ron Cobb, HR Giger, Rutger Hauer or Yaphet Kotto to cover up for his mistakes.
I was so hyped also then I saw it… as a self proclaimed history guy myself I thought it was one of the worst historical films ever made. The napoleon miniseries and waterloo eviscerate that pile of trash. Unless the purpose of the film was to deconstruct the Napoleonic empire? Which if that is the case it’s still an extraordinary failure. I also found it disturbing how little they focused on the major figures in Napoleons life. Men like Joachim Murat, Marshall Ney, Marshall Lannes, Marshall Duvout, Joseph and Louis Boneparte, Napoleon’s mother and father, Tallyrand, Fouchet, etc etc were not even footnotes in the film. The depiction of battles was also lacking and Napoleons major enemies weren’t even given much focus Tsar Alexander, Wellington, Archduke Charles , Marshall Blucher etc The film is not a history movie and much like gladiator the “history” was just a backdrop to tell a story however the only difference was Gladiator had a good story and Napoleon was trash. I would of loved to see Kubrick’s theoretical Napoleon film that was never greenlit because in contrast to Scott, Kubrick does deep research and meticulous planning and actually had an overall artistic vision Barry Lyndon was a masterpiece and given that film’s beauty I can only imagine how amazing a Kubrick Napoleon film would have been.
Scott has never given a shit about the script. He just likes making nifty images up on the screen and if you turn off your mind you can enjoy them. He's just a random director. Sometimes you're going to get great, which to be fair he has a lot of, then you're going to get the WTFs? like "Prometheus" and "Covenent." Maybe the one really solid movie he's made in the last decade or so was "Matchstick Men" with Nicholas Cage and Sam Rockwell as two con men. Nobody's seen it. It's great, and I had to keep constantly shaking my head and reminding myself Ridley Scott directed this. I couldn't figure out why except maybe it wasn't a gigantic production taking months of prep, could be done around LA and done quickly. But yeah, I wouldn't have him slow down either. He probably would drop dead. He's the most annoying director everyone will miss when he's gone.
Oh, man! Thanks for reminding me. Matchstick Men has been on my "to see" list for ages. I'm going to bump it to the top now. It did worse than fly under the radar. It appeared out of nothing and immediately left by the same door.
Hell Blade Runner is that too outside its visuals and hauers monologue at the end its a very forgetable film with paper thin characters. The visual design is the only reason people really remember the film.
Glad to see the love for Matchstick Men, I can't remember how I caught the movie originally, but I've recommended it to people ever since. Fantastic little film.
"Matchstick Men" really is great! Especially for anyone suffering from acrophobia, panic disorder, anxiety and/or depression. Nick Cage gives one his best hit-it-out-of-the-park performances. As a former sufferer of a few of the disorders listed, the movie is personal to me, filled with closely observed touches that turn "Matchstick Men" into a very special con artist movie. Perfect, in fact. And perfect since all of the disorders depicted are actually treatable. Panic attacks in particular. Strictly a small-time neurosis, indeed. Believe it or not, mon!
I would say his work style resembles a subcontractor more than a manager at McDonald's. Managers at McDonald's don't care about getting to the next project, because the next "project" is exactly the same as _this_ "project". But that's pretty much all that subcontractors seem to care about. Like the project they're working on right now is already money in the bank as far as they're concerned. The next project isn't such a sure thing yet, so _it_ requires the majority of their attention. The current project just needs to be over with as soon as possible.
In my opinion what it comes down to is that Ridley simply loves filmaking and he just wants to make as many films as humanly possible before he passes, I think he just really loves his job and he just doesn’t really care if most people like his films or not since he’s making them primarily for himself, he’s making movies just for the love of it regardless of quality, in a way I kind of respect him for that even if the movies he ends up making aren’t the greatest.
If you can't make good films anymore, then you should stop making them, instead of wasting people's time and money. He should be retired and fishing on a pond somewhere.
You may be right about that but I don't think it's admirable, it's selfish. There are other younger directors with hunger and fresh vision who are waiting and fighting for their chance to make it big.
@@bangband1 unfortunately that is not how it works. He gets founding because of his name, it doesn't mean that the same project would even exist if not for him. On the other side, scripts for set projects wouldn't magically become better just because someone else would direct. You'd get a story of some dude's career going downhill because of a big budget flop. Worse than that. Who would even go to see Napoleon if it wasn't directed by Scott, with all bells and whistles surrounding that, but by some "other younger director" instead?
Ridley ruined his own franchise. For a time there was a chance that we would have got a decent continuation of the Aliens franchise with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn directed by Neill Blomkamp. It looked utterly amazing as they produced some sketches for the ideas. Unfortunately some asshole invited Ridley back instead and the Blomkamp idea got torpedoed. I've always felt that Ridley's brother was the ultimate director, Tony Scott. Quality over quantity. Ridley should have retired, there are actually quite a few people in Hollywood who should have retired. There was no good reason to make a Gladiator 2. Gladiator didn't need a sequel, it was already perfect.
Yeah, Hollywood really did Blomkamp dirty. After the success of District 9 you'd expect him to receive a lot more offers for directing than he did. Instead it's like he was forgotten and once the quality of the films he did produce finally started to wane, well he got canned essentially. Today I think he's said he doesn't even want to work in Hollywood anymore, and it's not surprising.
@@themanicfiddler1152 just like so many other great new and talented directors ignored by Hollywood after just 1 or 2 movies, yet this 90 y.old arrogant fossil still getting huge budget every year for whatever he wants.
@@themanicfiddler1152 True, then again, the quality of his movies, scripts even casting went down horrifically! Going from District 9, through Elysium, the Chappy nonsense to the last techno religious BS?! Alien 5 with him at the helm would look great but we would NOT get anything better then Prometheus, Covenant nor Romulus, nothing he's done since District 9 shows we would. More copy/paste BS with the characters we like being de-aged, CGI'd or much, much older.
He was ALWAYS like that - you just weren't paying attention or noticing cause things would get ironed out in the post production OR someone would jump in during the production and point out that he's doing something wrong. Just think about the fact that there are so many versions of Blade Runner, where he would edit in and out tiny details between versions, re-imagining key plot ideas after the fact in conflict with everyone else's idea of the story (Deckard suddenly being a replicant in Scotts mind) - then dropping the idea entirely in the sequel he himself produced. One of the shots that needed fixing is an insert of Rutger Hauer - from later in the movie, complete with Joe Turkel's finger still in the shot - only mirrored. It ads nothing to the story, plot, ambience or rhythm of the movie - he just felt he needed a scene of Hauer there, before the next scene where he shows up. So he recycled an alternate take used later on and mirrored it - it's not like the audience will notice anyway. He was always lazy, he was always cutting corners and he was always incoherent - it's just that before someone with "high enough clearance" who cared about the project would do the cleanup. Now the cleanup consists of hired help retouching out cables and adding in CGI animals and whatnot.
It has been a long, long, time since I saw such a deeply ignorant, baseless, and facile statement as yours. Scott is 87 and still making movies. this is NOT a lazy person as anyone who has never worked on a film can tell you, it is mentally and physically exhausting. He does NOT cut corners, his attention to detail and meticulous planning via intricate storyboards of his movies is legendary. He is NOT incoherent, he may not have the command he once had, but he has directed some of the most important and ground breaking movies in recent cinema history, so to say that he always been incoherent is simply stupid. I know its tough what with your innate mental limitations, but you really should think before you infect public discourse with your sad, witless, opining.
You hit the nail on the head. Just read any of the making of accounts of his films, left to his own devices, he wrecks his own productions. I gave up after 1492.
@@NickLaslett yeah, it’s a good point actually, Blade Runner is simultaneously amazing and kinda incoherent, which we all forgave at the time, because it looked and felt so cool. That was back when there was only the voiceover version, and it tanked in cinemas. I saw it like 5 times though. I kept going though, even after he fell off a cliff. Legend. Then Someone To Watch Over Me. And Black Rain. He became consistently disappointing for a long time.
@@julianking4793 Gladiator 2 wasn't even technically incompetent. Just lazily shot. It's pretty standard coverage, bordering on what you would see on TV, but it's still good.
@@julianking4793 Moving rocks from one pile to another sure can be a lot of work - but you can still be intellectually a sloth while doing it. Which is what he's been doing. A lot of lazy, manual labor, delegated at others - where concentrated, insightful, intellectual work by the director was needed. Which he always lacked. E.g. G.I. Jane had an entire action sequence that took days to film, on which hundreds of work hours a hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent - and then it was dropped. He was ALWAYS incoherent and unfocused. Look up Creating a Myth: The Making of "Legend" - William Hjortsberg (writer) talks about how Scott almost made Cruise a LIZARD. Had Hjortsberg praised the idea instead of cautiously questioned it, there'd be a few more millions of dollars on the cutting floor - Scott was all gung ho to turn the production into a farce. All based on a few seconds of conversation with the writer about an idea he (Scott) got into his head out of nowhere. Scott was always good at two things - visualizing an exciting image from mere hints in the text AND delegating work. Basically, two main traits needed for directing. He has no control over the first thing - it's just how his mind works. He gets an image in his head and he gets all fired up about it. Call it inspiration, call it passion, call it vision, call it poor impulse control - but he has no command or control over it. Someone else has to step in and tell him he is wrong or he will just keep on straight down that road - to ruin or riches. His storyboards are a part and a symptom of that process - he has to create that scene or it will drive him mad. But... There's no one to stop him anymore. No one has the authority over him. What semblance of control or correction was there before is long gone. So we see a lot more ruin. Being old, he has lost the capacity to control the second thing he was good at - as you say, he is 87. He simply can't handle juggling all the cats that need to be herded while making a movie anymore. It awaits us all. Humans retire for a reason. Look up his earlier interviews, then fast forward to newer ones. He is clearly struggling with mental issues due to old age. E.g. 2016 Oscars THR Roundtable with Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Danny Boyle... - he contradicts himself all the time and his facial expressions are that of a child or a very old person struggling to comprehend all the conversation around him - there is no filter between emotional and intellectual understanding of conversation. He even "jams" verbally a few times - like when trying to interact with Tarantino. The only reason he is still capable of producing anything resembling a finished product is because he has natural talent for both visualizing and delegating. He can produce stuff on autopilot - though it is clearly bad and lazy because of it. But he never had the ability to self-control his primary talent, relying on his secondary one to do it for him - bouncing ideas off other people, expecting honest replies and correcting accordingly. I.e. Delegating detection of garbage ideas onto others. He can't do that anymore - he's too old and too easily tired to delegate efficiently, too influential and too famous to get honest input from adoring "Yes men" around him, too octogenarian to pick up on subtle emotional ques as his eyes and ears are clearly failing - and too proud to admit it. And it shows. He's fooling himself that he's fooling everyone else that he is still in his 40s. Trump is doing the same thing. They even share similar elderly patterns when speaking. Growing old is a bitch. Instead, he relies on technology as a crutch. Which breeds laziness. Thus multiple cameras - meaning no focus in the scene and actors without focus or even idea what they're doing. Thus lighting as in a daytime soap. Thus all work relying on post. Thus no mise en scene. Thus garbage. Look up "Overtime | The Martian (2015) Scene". It's here on youtube. Count all meaningless background and overhead lights. Look at all the actors doing "stuff" - pretending to work in the middle of a crucial NASA meeting. Look at poor Sean Bean. Look at all that lovely, lovely, vibrant monochromatic grayness. You could write a book about making movies (and how not do it) based on that scene alone.
@@MrScovanxtell me you are visually and thematically illiterate without telling me…. The Director’s Cut of Bladerunner is NOT the film with which to hold Scott to account for his latter day stinkers….
Blade Runner is absolutely meaningless if Deckard is a replicant. The whole theme of Philip K. Dick's story (and the theatrical release of Blade Runner) is a conflictvin which the most unlikely of men is ultimately forced to admit the essential humanity of the very manmade beings he's heretofore killed without compunction.
Scott is a "visualiser" - so what he's good at is taking the words that are on page and turning them into a visual film on a screen. He converts words to images. So, you can be confident that his films will have interesting imagery but - as you say - the film as a whole is only ever going to be as good as its script. And he doesn't seem to be much of a judge of a good script ... which suggests that some of those early classics might have been more luck than judgement, script-wise, i.e. he might have lucked into some already solid scripts. Let's not forget that several of his early classics were taken off him by the studio and edited against his will. "Blade Runner" was deemed impenetable by test audiences, so the story was "clarified" with the addition of Ford's voice-over. We might all be happy with our director's cut versions, sans voice-over, and consider Scott's original "vision" to have been vindicated, but we'll never know how that movie would play if we didn't already know the story. And then there's "Legend" which was also taken off him by the studio, shortened from 2 hours down to 90 minutes, given a completely different score, and had the _songs_ removed. That was Scott's original vision for that film, until the studio "interfered" and drastically changed it. The amazing visual design is intact in both versions, of course, but which version is better, the 90 minute fey fantasy that we got or the 2 hour musical fairytale that Scott intended? So maybe his judgement was always a bit suspect and the projects that went smoothly and everyone seems to like, such as Alien and Gladiator, were happy accidents; comings-together of a great script landing on his desk, and talented actors, designers, and crew assembling to make it all happen? Scott, meanwhile, seems more impatient in recent years and less bothered with the niceties, such as scripts that make sense and visuals that look finished. And his judgement is way off. No-one wanted a trilogy about who the "space jockey" was. Or a bad biopic of Napoleon. Or the Biblical Exodus story filtered through an atheist. Or a sequel to Gladiator. It seems he's increasingly willing to accept any old script that looks like it has a few scenes that'll get his visual imagination firing, and couldn't care less about the rest of it - especially piffling concerns like historical accuracy or passing basic sense-tests. You can tell he's annoyed to even have those things mentioned to him as faults. But they're fundamental faults, and if that stuff isn't on point then the film's going to be a stinker no matter how "visual" he makes it.
The only unforgivable sin in cinema is violating cause and effect and prometheus was guilty. You either use the rules of reality or you make up your own rules but then THE RULES MUST BE FOLLOWED. When something happens that makes no sense in our world or the world the filmmaker has created then the viewer (or I should say myself specifically) falls right out of the illusion and it's all ruined.
@@Sabundy no, average quality of his movies saw a sharp drop somewhere after The Martian, before that he could still make a good movie from time to time.
The Last Duel would have been a nice final film for Scott. It was positively received, and it would have served as a nice bookend along with The Duelists.
He said he finds love scenes boring but prefers rough sex and murder in Blade Runner and graphic rape and blood spattering battles in The Duelists. What does this say about Ridley Scott?
The Directors Cut of Napoleon is actually good. Yeah it's not "historically accurate" but that's not the point, it's a takedown of the "Great Man" trend of biopics and I respect him for that. History paints Napoleon one way, but in reality he was a horny, insecure Corsican peasant who also happened to be brilliant and ballsy. It's more like Scarface and I think that's pretty accurate in spirit if not in the details
@@natedogg890 "In reality," Napoleon was about as far from a peasant as one could get on Corsica. Descended from ancient Tuscan nobility, his father was an attorney and assessor for the French Royal Court in Ajaccio and the surrounding districts. Neither he, nor his children, ever did a day a day of paid manual labor (the defining characteristic of the peasantry). His two eldest sons (Joseph and Napoleon) were so well educated that they attained admission to the College d'Autin, with Napoleon continuing at the military college of Brienne, and finally to the academy in Paris. His life is the ultimate expression of the "great man" theory of history, which your post does nothing so much as make even more obvious.
@RWR1911 He was considered a peasant by everyone at the French court before his ascension, and a Corsican thug by the other great powers of Europe. Not debating the greatness of what he achieved, but a rise and fall story styled after a movie like Scarface is just as creatively valid as any other approach. Personally, I like his depiction in War in Peace the best as first a controversial agent of change, then as a marauding force of nature, and finally as a fallible, egotistical man, humbled in defeat
I just absolutely loved that film, surprisingly since I’ve been so underwhelmed by Ridley Scott’s work for the last 20 years or so. I can’t remember being so invested in a story as I was for the duel at the end, I genuinely cared what was going to happen.
Unpopular opinion: Ridley Scott is an extremely overrated director. His first three movies were absolute masterpieces, but after Blade Runner every single one of his works were hit and miss, visually very uninteresting with a preference for drab and unerexposed color palette. He also showed very little respect to the aritstry behind filmmaking by treating his movies as they were products designed to appease the audience, rather than tools to express himself.
partly disagree: Someone To Watch over Me is a great looking film. No murky or drab. so is Black Rain. Two #1 BO hits! But you didn't mention them. Wonder why.
They're always gorgeous to look at. Visually theyre stunning. But many are very good films..... Especially Black Hawk Dawn, Matchstick Men, Prometheus, Kingdom of Heaven are all very good films.
@RishiJha-d7v Visually they're correct. Made by people who knows about photography, frame composition, field of depth, lighting, etc. But nothing brilliant if I've to be honest. BHD, Prometheus and KoH are exactly that, from a visive pov they're just boring, and it's not even about colors because I actually love B/W movies
Fair comment about him not caring about good scripts. Everyone wanted Prometheus to succeed but for goodness sake Ridley, read the script before you start filming it.
I’m so glad you made this video. You touch it with a needle for me. Thank you. The most egregious thing I ever heard Scott say was his reaction to historians criticising the accuracy of his Napoleon movie, “Well, were you there?” I didn’t know about, “Get a life,” which is far worse. History just doesn’t work the way he thinks it does. And it shows that he has an ego that is too big to accept constructive criticism. There’s no denying that his legacy contains some of the greatest contributions to cinema ever, and if he never made another movie, he would remain one of the greats, inarguably, up there with Ford, Wells, Hitchcock, DePalma, Capra, Bigelow, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Leone, Carpenter, and the rest, as a director who not only made ground breaking movies, but who shaped the future of cinema and set out a path for so many other greats to follow. But he’s also a curmudgeonly old fart who seems uninterested in his legacy, or even in the art form itself, which has been something of a shock to me. I don’t know if it’s just him being super defensive and prickly in his old age, or if this has always been his philosophy? But he doesn’t seem to get that the public’s pushback at these (nowadays) increasingly regular outbursts are going to damage that all important bottom line. At least, it seems all important when you hear him talk about it. When I first heard a film critic interviewing Scott and asking him about some of the plotting flaws in Prometheus, (careful not to call them flaws but just asking questions about Scott’s choices) Scott’s only answer was that the film, “made a lot of money. We were in profit by the end of the first week after its release.” It’s such a shame and a reminder of that famous adage, “You should never meet your heroes.” As a lover of history, if I were ever to meet the great man, I would feel compelled to question some of his choices and I imagine I would get short shrift, or perhaps a quick balance sheet breakdown, followed by a, “shrifting.” I honestly thought he was more of an artist than he is. Or, more of an artist than he wishes to portray himself as?
Couldn't agree more about your observations regarding his inability to discern a good script from a bad one. It's such a waste to make a beautiful film with sh1tty characters, poorly written dialogue etc. I actively avoid his films these days, whilst living with the knowledge that he made two of my all time favourites. It's not easy to reconcile, but that's how it is. You've nailed everything else with your criticisms. Thank goodness he didn't have much to do with Blade Runner 2.
I agree with this, but you are a little unfair saying he could direct The Martian in his sleep. That is a great film, and his skill and technical proficiency is in full display there.
I liked Prometheus, in part because I never saw it heavily marketed as an Alien movie. But obviously the dialogue and the characters were terrible, despite the great actors. _Alien_ was all about the great characters and dialogue.
@@bulldogsbob No. It was stupid even as a standalone. The part where I abandoned any shred of hope was when the archeologist was evidently crushed with disappointment when they arrived at the destination planet. Why? They were flying over the sprawling ruins of an alien civilization! Wow! Horizon-to-horizon hard proof of intelligent alien life existing beyond our solar system. The Big Question, "are we alone" definitively answered once and for all! An entire planet's worth of exploration and treasures and wonders laid out before him, enough to excite generations of archeologists and spur the imaginations of everybody on Earth! But no.., he was disappointed. Huh? HUH?? Why? Because he wanted to shake hands with an alien or something. That was a very, very weird, childish reaction, completely out of keeping with what you'd expect any normal, rational person, especially one claiming to be a scientist, to have. And that was just one tiny example. There were tons of similar moments, glimpses into broken minds. That movie was literally insane.
This is a valid criticism and one I noticed when he made Someone to Watch Over Me. After Alien & Blade Runner I was expecting something great, instead it was an ordinary story over-decorated.
Really takes the Martin Scorsese quote to heart, "I have to get the next one going. There is no more time left for me." Like a lot of elderly who live well past retirement but refuse to quit. That they become their craft. You see it in people who suffer from Parkinson's or Alzheimer's even when they loss their memory and speech abilities, play a familiar tune and play that instrument as flawless as they did a half century ago.
He is a workaholic and can't stop. But it's no longer a labour of love. Even if the big budgets dry up, he can still make small budget movies for the rest of his life! On a tangential note, I just saw the Trump biopic, "The Apprentice". Leaving aside what you may think of the subject matter, it was superbly acted, shot, and edited. And it cost $16 million! The budgets of some modern movies are CRIMINAL.
You have to keep going when you're creative, even smaller projects to keep your skills up. If I wasn't working on small projects and editing I'd go insane
Cineranker, Scott is no longer an auteur; studios like him becuase he comes in under budget and on time. You want him to be Fincher or Nolan, but he isnt that.
"You want him to be Fincher or Nolan, but he isnt that." Thank God for that, since those two are terrible and overrated. You´re clearly a clueless millennial.
@@MrCarpen7er After his first botched film, Fincher has yet to make a terrible film. Most of them have, in fact, been masterful. Ridley Scott directed Exodus. And Legend. And Black Rain. And Prometheus. And Someone to Watch Over Me… Do I need to go on? There are others, as you’re no doubt aware.
Napoleon was appalling. I know a lot about Napoleon but my dad knew very little about him. I asked my dad after we watched it; “do you know now after watching that why Napoleon was a genius?”, and he didn’t. Surely Napoleon being a genius would have been a better story than some boring love story?
The biggest misconception about Ridley I often see is that his movies are as good as their scripts. That's simply not true if you take a look at scripts and production of his 3 best films. Alien had an average script elevated by final rewrites by Giler/Hill, Giger's design, actors, big budget and Ridley's direction, it could've easily been a 5/10 with the same script and much lower budget. Blade Runner had plenty of really bad drafts, early version of the monologue was embarrassing, the movie was elevated by on-set rewrites, Ridley's execution, Vangelis and actors. Gladiator had a bad script and both Russell and Ridley were very vocal about that, they changed the script a lot while filming it to make it work. The bottom line is Ridley is great when he cares, he cares when he faces many production problems and is forced to be more involved, he can make a great film off not very good script when he doesn't think about his mortality, not surrounded by yes men and constantly challenged with production problems. Unfortunately that Ridley is gone, his age did its thing, now he shits out product without nearly the same care he put years ago.
All are entitled to their choices but Alien is a far better film. Though, as I said- it's a matter of choices. I like the gothic, cold, cerebral horror more than the action and the relationship aspect of the sequel. I also loved the acting in the original- all the characters look and speak like real people, whereas with Cameron's film they clearly felt "filmy" especially the marines.
I actually love both, even Alien³, but to me Aliens is the GOAT, every single scene works on its own, not a single boring moment, everything is perfectly connected, dialogue clear, music perfect (only where needed). Of course as Canadian, I may be biased towards Cameron too ☺️
Exactly what I said about Gladiator II...felt like it was written by AI. Not saying it was...just that it was "by the numbers" with no actual emotional involvement.
Ive come to appreciate Tony Scott more as the years go by, very consistent work, True Romance is one of my favourite movies. For Ridley i love his early work but it feels like he hit his peak with Gladiator and has been declining ever since with the exception of The Martian i dont think id rewatch any of his newer movies.
@@platinum11110 what else explains the output. These films are definitely not artistic statements. Nothing wrong making money for doing something you love doing. His wife, children and children's children will live well for the work he is doing
@@BubblegumCrash332 I don't blame him, I blame big Hollywood studios who rejected so many new, talented directors, yet this fossil still getting massive budgets every year to do whatever he wants. He was good once, long time ago, but not that good. Certainly not today.
@@BubblegumCrash332 I worked on industrial placement at Cadburys when I was a photography student at the then Bournville School of Art in the early 1980s. The darkroom technician spent most of his time printing boring pictures of bars of chocolate. It was typical bread and butter stuff, not great art, but it payed the bills and kept a roof over his head.
This is spot on. As a writer myself, it drives me crazy that he doesn’t spend more time with the script. He seems to only care about the spectacle and nothing at all about the story or characters. A good story takes a long time to develop. The way these big budget films are slapped together is just criminal.
I have come to realise that the best things in the Scott's movies that I like are: cinematography, music and acting. It is never him. Gladiator II is awful btw.
Thanks for articulating what I've thought for many years now about Ridley Scott. He has two spots in my top ten movies ever so he still holds my immense gratitude whatever he decides to do.
A Director can't tell an Actor their job, or vice versa. Ridley Scott is a great admirer of Stan Kubrick (probably one of the reasons he did ALIEN) as he used Kubrick's...2001 SPACE ODYSSEY style there & look how well that turned out, he said on one film commentry that once his Actor's were cast, it left him free to consentrate on the technical aspects, this approach hasnt failed him
Ridley Scott films excel when the script is excellent I agree. Anything less than that his films are always entertaining and way above average. He is not an average film maker he's a visual genius. So if you think that film making is keeping him alive why would you want to stop him? "Mainly full of stinkers?" Come on man what are you on about?" Doesn't know what made his great films great?" Have you ever listened to a Ridley Scott directors commentary?
He certainly doesn't understand what made the original Gladiator good, or else he wouldn't have made a terrible copy of it for a sequel. And he's made a lot more bad or mediocre films than good films. He really hasn't made a genuinely good film since the first Gladiator. He made his best films in the late 70's/early 80's, and is decades past his prime. Time to retire.
Well, he is a director, not a writer. He is usually handed scripts by studios to directed and he can choose to say yes or no. He wants to keep things friendly and professional because it is good for business, so he usually says yes because it is good for business. That is a common occurrence in the industry. ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER were scripts he was handed that he had no hand in the creation of. He liked them and he was happy to film them. The problem with many of his films is that he isn't handed scripts that aren't very good. That is a problem that exists across the industry. A lack of good scripts to produce. We need better screenplays. It is an industry problem. Which is not Ripley Scott's fault.
The producers had control during Alien. With Blade Runner Scott tried very hard to ruin Hampton Fancher’s original script. The famous “tears in the rain” speech is authored by Rutger Hauer and isn’t even in David Peoples or Hampton Fancher’s script.
@@NickLaslett I worked on Blade Runner as a writer. And you don't know what you are talking about. The "tears in the rain" speech was in the original script.
I finally had to give up on Scott when he caved to investors and removed an entire subplot from Gladiator 2 because it centered on a character played by a Palestinian actress. There's a lot to unpack in that decision, but on a purely creative level, it betrayed that Scott no longer fought for his own artistic vision and is just a company man.
I think the only one of Scott’s films I’ve ever really loved is Alien. I have enjoyed films like The Martian and Thelma & Louise, but the rest of his work I’ve seen are kind of… meh. I didn’t like Blade Runner or Gladiator very much (generally shot well, good performances, just kind of boring) and the more comes out about Scott’s own comments on things like History have kind of deadened me towards him. I don’t need Historical films to be completely accurate but maybe don’t yell at Historians when they make their comments, tell them to “Get a life.” Also, blaming “millennials” for the failure of The Last Duel?
“I think the only one of Scott’s films I’ve ever really loved is Blade Runner. I have enjoyed films like The Martian and Thelma & Louise, but the rest of his work I’ve seen are kind of… meh. I didn’t like Blade Runner or Gladiator very much” So did you like blade runner or is it bad? You just contradicted yourself.
I find that Ridley and Tony were yin and yang. Whereas Ridley has the vision for grandeur and massive sets, Tony was the man to make omelets without eggs. For Ridley its all about the vision, Russell Crowe tells as much when speaking about Gladiator, Tony was about not only the action itself, but the build up of the characters about to engage in said action. On the other hand, i believe that Ridley has tried to recreate the same formula of Gladiator over and over again. Films like Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus feel like deviations from the original Gladiator, with same tropes. Other than that, one tends to forget that he did The Duellists, Thelma and Louise and Black Hawk Down, where it hit the spot just right. And then he has A Good Year which is for me the best sunday afternoon film, because of its so laid back atittude.
I hate admit this but maybe QT was right in this case with Ridley: some directors should stop at a certain age or past their creative prime. Ridley is efficient but the soul isn't present in his films anymore. Or was the soul gone long ago or never was there?
Just a heads up: At 12:02 you mention John Mathieson as Scott’s editor on “Gladiator II”. However, “Gladiator II” was edited by Sam Restivo and Claire Simpson. John Mathieson was the cinematographer.
That Robin Hood movie was so bad I pretty much gave up on him at that point. I haven't seen most of his movies since then. Talented people eventually get senile just like anyone else. Kubrick's last movie (Eyes Wide Shut) is just sort of a weird dream that doesn't really have a point or make sense, and that's about what I hear people saying about Megalopolis, too. It happens.
I think the problem with Ridley Scott is that many of his films, with the exception of Gladiator, Blade Runner, and Alien, are decent, but not great. There’s usually something missing in the writing, which he does not excel at. However, compared to most of the Marvel trash that we get nowadays, Scott’s films are masterpieces. Because we get epic period films so rarely, I’m willing to be more forgiving than I would be in other genres. I’m just glad these kind of films are being made.
I'd disagree he had a lot of great films Blackhawk Down, American Gangster, The Martian, and Thelma and Louise. Then there's films like Black Rain and White Squall which aren't great but damn good. Also Marvel films with a few exceptions are pretty fun.
He has only 5 writing credits and they are all short films. So if a writer on Prometheus was good enough he would have made a note about Davids accent, that is why he doesn't care about this type of details, he is 100% visual story teller
@ When I say writing, I don’t just mean the act itself. I mean working with other writers to develop a story. Scott is only as good as the material he’s given.
"It seems to be a process without vision." Absolutely. That multi-camera 'just choose the best one in editing' style is proof that he's treating movies as a fungible product to be churned out as quickly and efficiently as possible, at the cost of art, vision or soul. He's become the modern day Roger Corman lol. Is this just the curse of old age, or has modern cynicism destroyed another good creator? I really don't know.
Many of these questions about his decision-making echo those of George Lucas. Once a director surrounds themselves with yes people, they lose sight of what made their work great in the first place. Alien and Blade Runner were visionary films, but I lost interest in Scott after Legend, which was just disastrous I couldn't take him seriously any more. Lately, the statements I've read about him online make me loathe him. He's just lost. Your analysis really proved to me that my instincts were correct. Thanks.
Lucas has only directed three movies since the first Star Wars (1977), the dreadfully underwhelming prequels. He's basically been just a producer since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Really not doing the same thing as Ridley Scott.
The problem with almost all of Scott's recent films is that they are bad. Aside from that... Not technically, of course. But it's obvious he wants to say something, but has no idea what it is.
you nailed it. I am very disappointed by his recent works. I am glad that he didn't direct Blade Runner 2049, because Scott tends to pi$$ all over his legacy lately with stupid pre- and sequels or other mediocre movies. His interviews are also unwatchable these days,
As in life you're effected by all the scars and baggage that you accumulate over the years. Pour all your heart and soul and as much time as you can afford into planning and shooting your film and then watch it flop. Feel it tear your guts out. There's only so many times you can put yourself in that position. Then contrast that with how audiences might latch onto something you filmed as a compromise on the day because something you had your heart set on shooting just wasn't working. Pretty soon you come to the conclusion that the answer is just to shoot and not let yourself get so invested. Just enjoy the process (and make sure to get plenty of coverage while you're at it so you have more options in the edit) because at the end of the day there's really no telling what will work.
Ridley Scott is a legend. At 86, loves his job and continues to do it. Speculate all you want, rant all you want. When you have Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Thelma and Louise in your resume a legacy is the proof. Are you not entertained?
Ridley Scott is a force of nature, that's for sure. And you hit upon a good point. He feels that he's staying two steps ahead of mortality if he's always knee-deep in at least one project/film.
Prometheus is my favorite Scott movie. I don't know why people have it so much. Yes, the characters might be stupid, but aren't all humans? Wrapped up in their egos.
Could not disagree more, my friend. Prometheus was THE movie when I literally thought.....Ridley finally 'jumped the shark'. It has been downhill ever since. Sad. Please note that I still madly respect Mr. Scott. That will never change.
Prometheus is a flawed but still good film. Excellent themes, fantastic production values (it looked great) good performances. The story was a bit all over the place, less so than Covenant but John Logan is generally a great writer.
@@RealRoknRollr3108 Scott’s real mistake on Prometheus was hiring the ULTIMATE HACK for a writer….Damon Lindolof. The minute I read that I realized the movie was doomed and poor Ridley had too many ‘yes’ men around.
Are you high? that film is absolute dogsh*t despite looking good and having a cast of absolutely superb actors whom I usually love in their other roles. The script is the usual brain damaged 12 year old garbage hollywood has been ruining all its films with for decades now. CGI and a script written by someone with the emotions and intellect of a teenager do not a good film make. Films that are like watching someone else play playstation are not films.
He completely lost me at Blade Runner: the final cut. A total wasted opportunity to amplify one of the best movies ever made (IMHO). 25 years and he gives us a slightly shorter repeat of the director's cut, a spoilt child version where he finally gets his way, where he got to say what everyone else had originally told him was a stupid idea, that is that Deckard is a replicant. Predicatable and cliched even back in 1982. When you actually look at all the discarded scenes, you see that they added nothing to the original. Yeah, sure, he got rid of that clunky voice over; but, there was so much from the book that he could have worked in, but didn't. More and more, to me, Blade Runner looks like a movie that was saved in the editing by someone who knew what makes a good story. As for Prometheus, he lost me in the opening titles when we learned that we were not going to LV426! Talk about a bait and switch scam! Also, I realised that he must have so little confidence in the audiences' intelligence. Why did he (or the studios) feel the need to explain his movies at the beginning with pointless opening crawls. In BR final cut, why did he still leave that pointless piece of info in? He really must have thought we were stupid.
in PKD's book "Decard" is arrested and told he is an "andy" (android) but he realises they a fake cops, kills them, and escapes. why this was not in the movie, I dunno. What a scene! watch the BR workprint if you can. It shows Deckard actually detecting!
@@bobrew461 Would really have taken the original to another level. BR 2049 also didn't think to include this scene, which, for me was another wasted op.
@@dennisearle BR 2049 was terrible. Villeneuve is over-rated. He makes films which should be exciting, boring; Arrival, etc. Why the BR had to be some lonely lame idiot with a hologram GF escapes me. Why not just show the guy chasing some replicants, maybe getting his butt kicked along the way? Nope, it had to be high-brow. And look what they did to poor Gaffe! Don't get me started on the indestructable Fembot, that walked into a Police HQ and murdered the Chief, then just walked out! Some people actually think it's better than the original. :-0
Harrison Ford's film noir-ish voiceover makes the movie for me, always has. While Ford, himself, is on the record as not really liking the narration, he is also on the record saying he did the best he could with it (debunking the bizarre rumor that he tried to sabotage it with a poor effort).
And these guys have plenty of money and recognition. Feels like their ego is making it very very hard for them to simply bow out gracefully, and make room for someone younger, sharper and most importantly, hungrier for creativity.
He's trying to make grandiose or prestige-topic films without the necessary effort. Not even Kubrick with all his research dared to make a Napoleon film, and Scott thinks he can pull it off so easily?
I kind of feel like Ridley hasn’t slowed down or tried as hard on any of his films since his brother died. Seems like he’s running from his grief. Even in a recent interview for gladiator 2 he’s stated that he misses his brother.
For me he's really just old and impatient. He just want to made as much as he still is able to. Hence "we can fix it in post production". Done, go next basicly.
Tony Scott was the genius
Lol😅
you guys got it wrong, Ridley is being forced to use writers that he doesn't want and forced at least 3 woke writers, that's why his movies are low quality in that regard. His movies look worked on and very competent, which is why I want him making more movies until he dies, even if they are not masterpieces.
@@piotrkarp9562Yes. That's what John Mathieson (Scott's Director of Photography) said in an interview.
Whatever his faults, Blade Runner has haunted me since I saw it upon release, on a week night, in an empty theater. It became the very definition of the future for me at the time. Still feels that way sometimes.
this was his last decent film
I find it interesting that with the myriad of intellectual reviews of BR, I've not heard anyone talking about the implications of genetic engineering. You have a character making his own "living" friends, not to mention some of the other oddities that are dotted in the background of some scenes like a unicorn. JF Sebastian's plight is kinda messed up, but, he doesn't make it into reviews of the film. The future really could get grim if that becomes a reality.
The thing is, even Blade Runner showed that he didn't always understand the implications of his own films - giving the replicants eyes that glow when the light hits them just right makes for some beautiful shots, but it's also a way for the audience to consistently spot a replicant just by looking at them. In a film where a key theme is humanity meeting its technology in the middle, as the machines get ever more life-like and the humans get less and less so - to the point where we spend most of the film with Deckard and we still can't tell if he's a robot or not from his behaviour - this is missing the point.
@@adamborowicz7209what about Gladiator 1?
@@Talisguy I get where you're coming from but I think that some amount of difference between humans and replicants is to be expected from a story perspective too. Remember that the Voight-Kampf test is very much real to tell the difference, and weeds out the replicant in the opening in a couple questions.
Or do you mean that the eye lighting is too obvious in-universe?
Ridley is the definition of a mercenary director.
He's a true visionary, but wouldn't know a good script if it hit him in the head.
I'm just going to start listing movies:
Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator, American Gangster, Thelma and Louise, Kingdom of Heaven, The Martian, Prometheus, Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, the Last Duel, Napoleon (yes, the directors cut is actually good)
Stop this nonsense, he's got one of the best bodies of work ever, period
@@natedogg890 you've missed my entire point. He's a great _visionary_ but no one who knows what a good story is would have made Someone To Watch Over Me, Black Rain, 1492, White Squall, GI Jane, Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Vatican, The Counselour, Exodus, Covenant, or House Of Gucci. And when he's working with good material, he makes those great films you mentioned. His terrible films always look great - which I'd argue blatantly demonstrates his strengths/weaknesses.
@@zsht Prometheus, Covenant, GI Jane, Watch Over Me and Black Rain aren't "terrible movies" they aren't even bad movies, I'd honestly rather rewatch those over 90% of the slop being put out on streaming today.
Saying Ridley Scott has a terrible eye for writing is like saying James Brown had terrible lyrics. The fact that Scott can make a watchable, stylish movie in his sleep and that James Brown could make a hit song using like 10 real words is a feature, not a bug.
@@natedogg890 We are never going to find an amiable middle ground in our opinions if you think those movies are good. I love many of Ridley's works, but that doesn't blind me to the absolute slop he's also made, and in every single one of those cases, the screenwriting is the issue.
@@zsht I didn't say they were great, but they are all very watchable, Prometheus and Covenant even flirt with greatness at times. Could the writing have been better? Yes. Given that we have so many absolute classics from Scott, I don't really care if some of the others range from just "good" to "kinda bad".
I don't really care if our options find compromise, opinions have no value anymore, I don't know if they ever did.
The Biggest Sin of Gladiator 2 is that it's a lesser version of Gladiator. The entire story is the same as Gladiator except they split Maximus' backstory into 2 characters.
Gladiator is a straight remake of The Fall of the Roman Empire
@@ConcreteowlI have just read the script, and there are a lot of similarities. But many points come from history itself
I managed to sidestep my Gaming Groups’ plan to go see G2… I thought Red One would have been a better flick…
The fight scenes in Gladiator 1 were really abysmal: fast cuts, shaky camera's, sub par choreography. For a film where fighting is one of the key parts, that is really unforgivable. At least that was much better in Gladiator 2. Also the whole cheesy melodramatic heaven stuff in Gladiator 1 ("You will meet them again, but not yet..." | "Go to them... You're home...") was toned down in 2. And so only for those two things Gladiator 2 is the better movie.
never had a son,unlike Maximus, in fact 2 sons. so no.
My father worked with Ridley back on the 1st Alien & the man was
near full blown bonkers back then.
The guys who were on set were all starting to have just about enough of
Ridley cos of the stress & working on the repeatative ships 'tunnels'.
Ridley went mental one day & randomly punched straight through the
ships ceiling smashing a great hole in my dads newly finished job.
The film crew all had t-shirts printed up the next day with some
insinuating comment towards Ridley though Ridley defused the situation
by having his own T-shirt made up with a light hearted comment printed on.
Ridley actually talks about the incident if you listen to his'Making of Alien'
interview.
Blade Runner is my favourite movie, and the more Scott films I see the more I think the whole movie was a "Happy Accident". Vangelis was 50% of the soul of that movie...just like Zimmer was the soul of Gladiator.
absolutely, it's the combination of incredible talents that make BR the best film of all time and the absolute peak of practical effects
Rutger Hauer improvised the ending soliloquy.
absolute rubbish, Gladiator is a masterpiece without Zimmer,much like Gladiator 2 is,as is American Gangster, as is Columbus film,as is Napoleon last year,as is A Good Year,as is Alien and many more, he is great. Kingdom of Heaven is highly underrated. Robin Hood was amazing
I think you are right..P.K. Dick, Sid Mead, Harrison Ford, Rodger Hauer in Blade Runner ... H.R. Giger , Ron Schusett, Dan O Bannon, Ron Cobb and Sigourney Weaver in Alien.....and of course the sound tracks...John Williams and Vangalis.. all happy accidents and real reason for these works of art!
movies are a collaboration between 100s sometimes 1000s of people it's insane a director gets his name stamped on it like he did it all
Ridley's films are hit and miss, but when they hit, they hit like a batter ram. I met Ridley. One of the nicest, most down to earth people I've ever met in the biz. He's extremely professional and levelheaded.
A BATTER RAM 😂😂😂😂
WHAT KIND OF BATTER?
@@slappy8941 pancake, for sure.
I love the narrator suggesting his films look so different to each other! They do not; they look identical and have done for many years as he keeps using the same technicians over and over and over and over again. The only standout films of his are his first three and I'd toss in Hannibal. He may well be a worse producer than director as the films he produced are generally poor and may well have been instrumental in killing the alien when no one else could!
@@slappy8941whatever they eat in the UK ... crumpets is it ?
He made some of my all times favorite movies... in the 80s.. the Martian and American Ganster were the best recent movies that he made...
I think you are spot on when considering his 87 years and that he is haunted by time. No one lives for ever, and that is a feeling increasingly felt with age.
absolute rubbish, Clint Eastwood and others have no such issues,and he is much older than Ridley. Gladiator 2 was excellent,just as first film. What are you blabbering about?
You have to remember that before he began his film career, Scott directed over 2000 television commercials. Being a workman director is exactly what commercial production is like. I would imagine that that is where his filmmaking attitude came from. I would rather watch a crappy Ridley Scott movie than any one of a dozen movies that pass for what’s number one at the box office these days.
@@erictuxen so you prefer exodus to alien 1?
@@starwarsprequelsandsequels7582 he'd rather watch bad movies than good ones?
@@MadsterV obviously Alien was not released in what I refer to as "these" days, as in now. I've yet to see Exodus. My point was Ridley Scott's work, rushed or not, outshines a lot of what is in theaters today. By that I mean the year 2024, not 1979 when Alien was released ;-)
Such a pretentious thing to say. Plenty of good movies have come out.
Scott has made five good movies and tons of trash.
@@TheGreatestJediOfAllTime Alien isn' a "good" movie. It is master piece. Calling his five best movies "good" is just so dismissive of his work. The hyperbole is tyring. He's made a bunch of disappointing movies after the turn of the millenium but exceedingly few of these movies could be called "trash" by anyone with a shred of nuance. That was the point of the original comment. Gladiator 2 isn't perfect by any means but it's still a "good" movie.
I agree 100%. I've followed Scott's career over the decades and I have similar thoughts on why his career has been so uneven. His first three proper films (The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner) are pure gold, but his films these days are pure crap. I have a real love hate relationship with this guy
Make a list of your favorite movies then count up the films by director. He's always far and away my number one.
absolutely, those 3 are superb, the rest are terrible and get seemingly worse with each film
@@dinkmartini3236 The Coen brothers come out on top for me, by an absolute country mile. Ridley's made 3 good movies.......the rest are pure shite.
Click bait video. The Martian was a good film. As well as Thelma and Louise. I think Kingdom of Heaven is very good.
As for Napoleon, I watched the Director’s Cut and I think it’s a very good film.
@@Dandroid5000 Yeah, the brothers are indeed top notch.
Ridley is just a master *CRAFTSMAN* ; his technical abilities are almost unparalleled.
But he has always depended on the right creative collaborators to work with him. ALIEN was ALIEN because of his collaborators--Scott didn't do everything whole cloth. He hasn't had the right creatives working with him the last several years. With PROMETHEUS, he used 2 separate screenwriters instead of sticking with 1, and the 2 storylines weren't merged well at all. I'm still convinced that Fox destroyed ALIEN COVENANT and Scott just rolled with it to save his job. I think he's just trying to do too much and not having the right people do the work he can't do himself.
this is it
I remember many years ago Fox posted online a series of interviews with filmmakers, and one of them was Ridley Scott.
In one segment he basically explained his changing attitude to suddenly becoming very prolific. He talked about how he used to agonise over which movie to make. But then he had a moment where he literally said to himself: "Just f**king do it..."
That’s a rather disappointing attitude, then.
But look at James Cameron, he's wasting all his talent in the Avatar series...
he plows on one after another BECAUSE he's almost 90. he's working like a man who sees the clock ticking. what he does is make movies. and he wants to do as much of what he does as he can. considering that the studios seem to be happy to foot the bill, let the man play with his train set, i say.
Hear, Hear!
Yeah, Let him cook
Yeah, who cares at this point if he doesn't land a masterpiece. At the end of the day, he'll still go down as a legend.
Whatever
As Martin Scorsese said himself, "I have to get the next one going, there is no more time left."
One of the most arrogant men alive.
I think the Martian was probably the last really decent movie he made.
I'm not really interested in anything he's doing.
I wrote him off after Kingdom of Heaven, but he later managed The Martian. So it's worth paying attention to see if he manages another good one.
@rickdesper I saw the directors cut and kinda enjoyed it not a great movie but not bad.
always liked KoH
I think Cameron and Musk would give him a run for his money with arrogance.
I came with Legend and never stopped
He should have been stopped a decade ago. He killed the Alien franchise, even with the just ok Romulus. He was a brilliant talent but he lost his edge and vision many years past. He's been living on previous good reputation for the same amount of time.
I enjoyed Prometheus, personally.
No, that is a bad opinion @@jonq8714
"he should have been stopped" omg how on earth you even think this way,???
I agree, he needs to be stopped. By force if necessary, it's getting so bad now.
Please, the alien franchise was dead by the time they did Alien Resurrection.
And when they greenlit those godawful Aliens vs Predator films (some things should REMAIN in bad comics only) you know they didnt care anymore and just wanted to earn a "quick buck" with the dregs of comicbook fandom.
We still got hordes of drooling chimps asking "where do Predators fit in all this?" for every single Alien film as if that was the plan from the very beginning. Unbelievable.
It was already dead long before he did Prometheus. He failed to ressurect it. Understand??
This is the only time I’ve heard someone call out the crappy Space Jockey/Engineer storyline! Thank you!
Both Tarantino and Red Letter Media called it out for being bad
No accounting for taste. Prometheus was awesome.
Duellists - - Every shot is an oil painting. I've calmed down a bit but when I first discovered that gem I'd watch it twice back-to-back every time I watched it. When it was over I was salivating to get it going again.
ever see Barry Lyndon? It influenced that film.
Not only is The Duelists visually amazing, but it's also very historically accurate, specially the fencing/sword duels.
Something Scott doesn't give a toss anymore in his so-called ''historical dramas''.
Its his best film , imo. Because it feels soo authentic and is thrilling.
It’s the other way around. The Duelists came out two years after Barry Lyndon.
@@mumboslick89 I know. That's what I was saying.
You nailed it with the observation that RS apparently has no idea of what makes his greatest films timeless and unique. "Alien" is relentlessly focused, claustrophobic and almost tactile in its atmosphere; the prequels are dumfoundingly slick and stupid. AND pretentious on top of that.
I found "House of Gucci" (2021) quite haunting after the second watch, and would watch it again despite not being interested in the world of fashion. It's about the relationship between the heirs of the famous Italian family business, a key marriage and the real-life murder that brought it to its knees. Stars Adam Driver (a Ridley favourite) and the very watchable, seething Lady Gaga are ably helped by a magnificent soundtrack.
I think a lot of Ridley Scott's films come alive when watched more than once. Without having to worry about the plot, the sumptuous visuals and atmospheric soundtrack allow details of what the characters are going through to fully emerge.
That gives me hope to watch it again
IMO a few things are in play: 1) If Scott stops making movies, he has to think about his life... and loss. 2) Studios want to make sequels to his work with or without him, so he's decided with him at the helm (kind of like Harrison Ford playing Indy one last time instead of having the role re-cast and continue without him). 3) He's trying to solidify the financial position of his family prior to his death. I've seen all of these aspects in Hollywood so feel pretty confident they're at play with Scott. He's certainly not currently making films to solidify his reputation (they aren't helping that) or because he's passionate about the projects (it's clear he's not).
Gladiator 2 burnt. DON'T LET THIS MAN COOK.
Ach it was alright.
@ThursoBerwick rather just watch gladiator 1 again
@ThursoBerwick no it wasn't, it's a cringe parody of the first movie
It burnt so much several of the characters came out black
@@heldinahtmlhell Denzel Washington's character was North African. Just that Hollywood struggles with the "north" part of that phrase.
The only reason why we think of Scott as a great director is because he had epic crews to work with with amazing actors, set designers and DPs. That age of moviemaking is gone, everything is lazy and generic and everyone is on autopilot now, so he doesn't have absolute legends like Ron Cobb, HR Giger, Rutger Hauer or Yaphet Kotto to cover up for his mistakes.
After Napoleon, i'll never watch another one of his movies.
I were so hyped, and i could not finish that trash movie
@Hank-q8u Me too man, i could not finish.
At least you didn't waste your money on it in IMAX....
I was so hyped also then I saw it… as a self proclaimed history guy myself I thought it was one of the worst historical films ever made. The napoleon miniseries and waterloo eviscerate that pile of trash. Unless the purpose of the film was to deconstruct the Napoleonic empire? Which if that is the case it’s still an extraordinary failure. I also found it disturbing how little they focused on the major figures in Napoleons life. Men like Joachim Murat, Marshall Ney, Marshall Lannes, Marshall Duvout, Joseph and Louis Boneparte, Napoleon’s mother and father, Tallyrand, Fouchet, etc etc were not even footnotes in the film. The depiction of battles was also lacking and Napoleons major enemies weren’t even given much focus Tsar Alexander, Wellington, Archduke Charles , Marshall Blucher etc
The film is not a history movie and much like gladiator the “history” was just a backdrop to tell a story however the only difference was Gladiator had a good story and Napoleon was trash. I would of loved to see Kubrick’s theoretical Napoleon film that was never greenlit because in contrast to Scott, Kubrick does deep research and meticulous planning and actually had an overall artistic vision Barry Lyndon was a masterpiece and given that film’s beauty I can only imagine how amazing a Kubrick Napoleon film would have been.
@@walmartian422 preach brother!
Scott has never given a shit about the script. He just likes making nifty images up on the screen and if you turn off your mind you can enjoy them. He's just a random director. Sometimes you're going to get great, which to be fair he has a lot of, then you're going to get the WTFs? like "Prometheus" and "Covenent." Maybe the one really solid movie he's made in the last decade or so was "Matchstick Men" with Nicholas Cage and Sam Rockwell as two con men. Nobody's seen it. It's great, and I had to keep constantly shaking my head and reminding myself Ridley Scott directed this. I couldn't figure out why except maybe it wasn't a gigantic production taking months of prep, could be done around LA and done quickly.
But yeah, I wouldn't have him slow down either. He probably would drop dead. He's the most annoying director everyone will miss when he's gone.
Oh, man! Thanks for reminding me. Matchstick Men has been on my "to see" list for ages. I'm going to bump it to the top now. It did worse than fly under the radar. It appeared out of nothing and immediately left by the same door.
Hell Blade Runner is that too outside its visuals and hauers monologue at the end its a very forgetable film with paper thin characters. The visual design is the only reason people really remember the film.
Glad to see the love for Matchstick Men, I can't remember how I caught the movie originally, but I've recommended it to people ever since. Fantastic little film.
"Matchstick Men" really is great! Especially for anyone suffering from acrophobia, panic disorder, anxiety and/or depression. Nick Cage gives one his best hit-it-out-of-the-park performances. As a former sufferer of a few of the disorders listed, the movie is personal to me, filled with closely observed touches that turn "Matchstick Men" into a very special con artist movie. Perfect, in fact. And perfect since all of the disorders depicted are actually treatable. Panic attacks in particular. Strictly a small-time neurosis, indeed. Believe it or not, mon!
@@jackd6881 no.
I would say his work style resembles a subcontractor more than a manager at McDonald's.
Managers at McDonald's don't care about getting to the next project, because the next "project" is exactly the same as _this_ "project". But that's pretty much all that subcontractors seem to care about. Like the project they're working on right now is already money in the bank as far as they're concerned. The next project isn't such a sure thing yet, so _it_ requires the majority of their attention. The current project just needs to be over with as soon as possible.
In my opinion what it comes down to is that Ridley simply loves filmaking and he just wants to make as many films as humanly possible before he passes, I think he just really loves his job and he just doesn’t really care if most people like his films or not since he’s making them primarily for himself, he’s making movies just for the love of it regardless of quality, in a way I kind of respect him for that even if the movies he ends up making aren’t the greatest.
Agree with this ^ 💯
If you can't make good films anymore, then you should stop making them, instead of wasting people's time and money. He should be retired and fishing on a pond somewhere.
It's not a case of whether people like them or not, it's a case of his films being dogsh*t.
You may be right about that but I don't think it's admirable, it's selfish. There are other younger directors with hunger and fresh vision who are waiting and fighting for their chance to make it big.
@@bangband1 unfortunately that is not how it works. He gets founding because of his name, it doesn't mean that the same project would even exist if not for him. On the other side, scripts for set projects wouldn't magically become better just because someone else would direct. You'd get a story of some dude's career going downhill because of a big budget flop.
Worse than that. Who would even go to see Napoleon if it wasn't directed by Scott, with all bells and whistles surrounding that, but by some "other younger director" instead?
Ridley ruined his own franchise. For a time there was a chance that we would have got a decent continuation of the Aliens franchise with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn directed by Neill Blomkamp. It looked utterly amazing as they produced some sketches for the ideas. Unfortunately some asshole invited Ridley back instead and the Blomkamp idea got torpedoed. I've always felt that Ridley's brother was the ultimate director, Tony Scott. Quality over quantity. Ridley should have retired, there are actually quite a few people in Hollywood who should have retired. There was no good reason to make a Gladiator 2. Gladiator didn't need a sequel, it was already perfect.
Gladiator II was okay. I'm glad I saw it. Not a classic perhaps.
Yeah, Hollywood really did Blomkamp dirty. After the success of District 9 you'd expect him to receive a lot more offers for directing than he did. Instead it's like he was forgotten and once the quality of the films he did produce finally started to wane, well he got canned essentially. Today I think he's said he doesn't even want to work in Hollywood anymore, and it's not surprising.
@@themanicfiddler1152 just like so many other great new and talented directors ignored by Hollywood after just 1 or 2 movies, yet this 90 y.old arrogant fossil still getting huge budget every year for whatever he wants.
@ThursoBerwick It's OK if you like watered down copy/paste cash grabs, clearly you might.
@@themanicfiddler1152 True, then again, the quality of his movies, scripts even casting went down horrifically! Going from District 9, through Elysium, the Chappy nonsense to the last techno religious BS?! Alien 5 with him at the helm would look great but we would NOT get anything better then Prometheus, Covenant nor Romulus, nothing he's done since District 9 shows we would. More copy/paste BS with the characters we like being de-aged, CGI'd or much, much older.
He was ALWAYS like that - you just weren't paying attention or noticing cause things would get ironed out in the post production OR someone would jump in during the production and point out that he's doing something wrong.
Just think about the fact that there are so many versions of Blade Runner, where he would edit in and out tiny details between versions, re-imagining key plot ideas after the fact in conflict with everyone else's idea of the story (Deckard suddenly being a replicant in Scotts mind) - then dropping the idea entirely in the sequel he himself produced.
One of the shots that needed fixing is an insert of Rutger Hauer - from later in the movie, complete with Joe Turkel's finger still in the shot - only mirrored.
It ads nothing to the story, plot, ambience or rhythm of the movie - he just felt he needed a scene of Hauer there, before the next scene where he shows up. So he recycled an alternate take used later on and mirrored it - it's not like the audience will notice anyway.
He was always lazy, he was always cutting corners and he was always incoherent - it's just that before someone with "high enough clearance" who cared about the project would do the cleanup.
Now the cleanup consists of hired help retouching out cables and adding in CGI animals and whatnot.
It has been a long, long, time since I saw such a deeply ignorant, baseless, and facile statement as yours. Scott is 87 and still making movies. this is NOT a lazy person as anyone who has never worked on a film can tell you, it is mentally and physically exhausting. He does NOT cut corners, his attention to detail and meticulous planning via intricate storyboards of his movies is legendary. He is NOT incoherent, he may not have the command he once had, but he has directed some of the most important and ground breaking movies in recent cinema history, so to say that he always been incoherent is simply stupid. I know its tough what with your innate mental limitations, but you really should think before you infect public discourse with your sad, witless, opining.
You hit the nail on the head. Just read any of the making of accounts of his films, left to his own devices, he wrecks his own productions. I gave up after 1492.
@@NickLaslett yeah, it’s a good point actually, Blade Runner is simultaneously amazing and kinda incoherent, which we all forgave at the time, because it looked and felt so cool. That was back when there was only the voiceover version, and it tanked in cinemas. I saw it like 5 times though. I kept going though, even after he fell off a cliff. Legend. Then Someone To Watch Over Me. And Black Rain. He became consistently disappointing for a long time.
@@julianking4793 Gladiator 2 wasn't even technically incompetent. Just lazily shot. It's pretty standard coverage, bordering on what you would see on TV, but it's still good.
@@julianking4793 Moving rocks from one pile to another sure can be a lot of work - but you can still be intellectually a sloth while doing it. Which is what he's been doing.
A lot of lazy, manual labor, delegated at others - where concentrated, insightful, intellectual work by the director was needed. Which he always lacked.
E.g. G.I. Jane had an entire action sequence that took days to film, on which hundreds of work hours a hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent - and then it was dropped.
He was ALWAYS incoherent and unfocused. Look up Creating a Myth: The Making of "Legend" - William Hjortsberg (writer) talks about how Scott almost made Cruise a LIZARD.
Had Hjortsberg praised the idea instead of cautiously questioned it, there'd be a few more millions of dollars on the cutting floor - Scott was all gung ho to turn the production into a farce.
All based on a few seconds of conversation with the writer about an idea he (Scott) got into his head out of nowhere.
Scott was always good at two things - visualizing an exciting image from mere hints in the text AND delegating work. Basically, two main traits needed for directing.
He has no control over the first thing - it's just how his mind works. He gets an image in his head and he gets all fired up about it.
Call it inspiration, call it passion, call it vision, call it poor impulse control - but he has no command or control over it. Someone else has to step in and tell him he is wrong or he will just keep on straight down that road - to ruin or riches.
His storyboards are a part and a symptom of that process - he has to create that scene or it will drive him mad.
But... There's no one to stop him anymore. No one has the authority over him. What semblance of control or correction was there before is long gone.
So we see a lot more ruin.
Being old, he has lost the capacity to control the second thing he was good at - as you say, he is 87.
He simply can't handle juggling all the cats that need to be herded while making a movie anymore. It awaits us all. Humans retire for a reason.
Look up his earlier interviews, then fast forward to newer ones. He is clearly struggling with mental issues due to old age.
E.g. 2016 Oscars THR Roundtable with Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Danny Boyle... - he contradicts himself all the time and his facial expressions are that of a child or a very old person struggling to comprehend all the conversation around him - there is no filter between emotional and intellectual understanding of conversation.
He even "jams" verbally a few times - like when trying to interact with Tarantino.
The only reason he is still capable of producing anything resembling a finished product is because he has natural talent for both visualizing and delegating. He can produce stuff on autopilot - though it is clearly bad and lazy because of it.
But he never had the ability to self-control his primary talent, relying on his secondary one to do it for him - bouncing ideas off other people, expecting honest replies and correcting accordingly.
I.e. Delegating detection of garbage ideas onto others.
He can't do that anymore - he's too old and too easily tired to delegate efficiently, too influential and too famous to get honest input from adoring "Yes men" around him, too octogenarian to pick up on subtle emotional ques as his eyes and ears are clearly failing - and too proud to admit it. And it shows.
He's fooling himself that he's fooling everyone else that he is still in his 40s. Trump is doing the same thing. They even share similar elderly patterns when speaking.
Growing old is a bitch.
Instead, he relies on technology as a crutch. Which breeds laziness.
Thus multiple cameras - meaning no focus in the scene and actors without focus or even idea what they're doing.
Thus lighting as in a daytime soap.
Thus all work relying on post.
Thus no mise en scene.
Thus garbage.
Look up "Overtime | The Martian (2015) Scene". It's here on youtube.
Count all meaningless background and overhead lights. Look at all the actors doing "stuff" - pretending to work in the middle of a crucial NASA meeting. Look at poor Sean Bean.
Look at all that lovely, lovely, vibrant monochromatic grayness.
You could write a book about making movies (and how not do it) based on that scene alone.
Muscling the unicorn into Blade Runner: The Final Cut was the first sign.
The Unicorn appeared in the 1992 Director's Cut by the way...
@@richieclean Yes, it was muscled in for the Directors Cut -- it's a stupid addition no matter the year it was added.
@@MrScovanxAbsolutely a Chekhov's premonition.
@@MrScovanxtell me you are visually and thematically illiterate without telling me…. The Director’s Cut of Bladerunner is NOT the film with which to hold Scott to account for his latter day stinkers….
Blade Runner is absolutely meaningless if Deckard is a replicant. The whole theme of Philip K. Dick's story (and the theatrical release of Blade Runner) is a conflictvin which the most unlikely of men is ultimately forced to admit the essential humanity of the very manmade beings he's heretofore killed without compunction.
Scott is a "visualiser" - so what he's good at is taking the words that are on page and turning them into a visual film on a screen. He converts words to images. So, you can be confident that his films will have interesting imagery but - as you say - the film as a whole is only ever going to be as good as its script. And he doesn't seem to be much of a judge of a good script ... which suggests that some of those early classics might have been more luck than judgement, script-wise, i.e. he might have lucked into some already solid scripts.
Let's not forget that several of his early classics were taken off him by the studio and edited against his will. "Blade Runner" was deemed impenetable by test audiences, so the story was "clarified" with the addition of Ford's voice-over. We might all be happy with our director's cut versions, sans voice-over, and consider Scott's original "vision" to have been vindicated, but we'll never know how that movie would play if we didn't already know the story.
And then there's "Legend" which was also taken off him by the studio, shortened from 2 hours down to 90 minutes, given a completely different score, and had the _songs_ removed. That was Scott's original vision for that film, until the studio "interfered" and drastically changed it. The amazing visual design is intact in both versions, of course, but which version is better, the 90 minute fey fantasy that we got or the 2 hour musical fairytale that Scott intended?
So maybe his judgement was always a bit suspect and the projects that went smoothly and everyone seems to like, such as Alien and Gladiator, were happy accidents; comings-together of a great script landing on his desk, and talented actors, designers, and crew assembling to make it all happen? Scott, meanwhile, seems more impatient in recent years and less bothered with the niceties, such as scripts that make sense and visuals that look finished. And his judgement is way off. No-one wanted a trilogy about who the "space jockey" was. Or a bad biopic of Napoleon. Or the Biblical Exodus story filtered through an atheist. Or a sequel to Gladiator.
It seems he's increasingly willing to accept any old script that looks like it has a few scenes that'll get his visual imagination firing, and couldn't care less about the rest of it - especially piffling concerns like historical accuracy or passing basic sense-tests. You can tell he's annoyed to even have those things mentioned to him as faults. But they're fundamental faults, and if that stuff isn't on point then the film's going to be a stinker no matter how "visual" he makes it.
I knew Scott has absolutely lost his goddamn mind after seeing Prometheus
The only unforgivable sin in cinema is violating cause and effect and prometheus was guilty. You either use the rules of reality or you make up your own rules but then THE RULES MUST BE FOLLOWED. When something happens that makes no sense in our world or the world the filmmaker has created then the viewer (or I should say myself specifically) falls right out of the illusion and it's all ruined.
It was Napoleon for me. Somebody needs to stop him from putting out more slop Gladiator 2 being a more recent example.
@@undermoonstars He was making 💩💩💩at a high frequency long before Napoleon.
Prometheus is great
@@Sabundy no, average quality of his movies saw a sharp drop somewhere after The Martian, before that he could still make a good movie from time to time.
The Last Duel would have been a nice final film for Scott. It was positively received, and it would have served as a nice bookend along with The Duelists.
He said he finds love scenes boring but prefers rough sex and murder in Blade Runner and graphic rape and blood spattering battles in The Duelists. What does this say about Ridley Scott?
The Directors Cut of Napoleon is actually good. Yeah it's not "historically accurate" but that's not the point, it's a takedown of the "Great Man" trend of biopics and I respect him for that. History paints Napoleon one way, but in reality he was a horny, insecure Corsican peasant who also happened to be brilliant and ballsy. It's more like Scarface and I think that's pretty accurate in spirit if not in the details
@@natedogg890 "In reality," Napoleon was about as far from a peasant as one could get on Corsica. Descended from ancient Tuscan nobility, his father was an attorney and assessor for the French Royal Court in Ajaccio and the surrounding districts. Neither he, nor his children, ever did a day a day of paid manual labor (the defining characteristic of the peasantry). His two eldest sons (Joseph and Napoleon) were so well educated that they attained admission to the College d'Autin, with Napoleon continuing at the military college of Brienne, and finally to the academy in Paris. His life is the ultimate expression of the "great man" theory of history, which your post does nothing so much as make even more obvious.
@RWR1911 He was considered a peasant by everyone at the French court before his ascension, and a Corsican thug by the other great powers of Europe. Not debating the greatness of what he achieved, but a rise and fall story styled after a movie like Scarface is just as creatively valid as any other approach. Personally, I like his depiction in War in Peace the best as first a controversial agent of change, then as a marauding force of nature, and finally as a fallible, egotistical man, humbled in defeat
I just absolutely loved that film, surprisingly since I’ve been so underwhelmed by Ridley Scott’s work for the last 20 years or so. I can’t remember being so invested in a story as I was for the duel at the end, I genuinely cared what was going to happen.
I think Old Man Scott (along w/ his Capt Vickers) was crushed to atoms by his phenomenally gargantuan rolling bagel at the end of "Prometheus."
Alien Covenant was shockingly mechanical in its execution.
I didn't think it could be so much worse than Prometheus... it actually made me like that one a little more
...a little
Unpopular opinion: Ridley Scott is an extremely overrated director.
His first three movies were absolute masterpieces, but after Blade Runner every single one of his works were hit and miss, visually very uninteresting with a preference for drab and unerexposed color palette. He also showed very little respect to the aritstry behind filmmaking by treating his movies as they were products designed to appease the audience, rather than tools to express himself.
partly disagree:
Someone To Watch over Me is a great looking film. No murky or drab.
so is Black Rain.
Two #1 BO hits!
But you didn't mention them. Wonder why.
They're always gorgeous to look at. Visually theyre stunning. But many are very good films..... Especially Black Hawk Dawn, Matchstick Men, Prometheus, Kingdom of Heaven are all very good films.
@bobrew461 Fuck you're right, Black Rain was great too. Not Aliencor Blade Runner-type of great, but close
@RishiJha-d7v Visually they're correct.
Made by people who knows about photography, frame composition, field of depth, lighting, etc. But nothing brilliant if I've to be honest. BHD, Prometheus and KoH are exactly that, from a visive pov they're just boring, and it's not even about colors because I actually love B/W movies
@rcogburn12 Imho the drab era in his filmography started with Hannibal
Fair comment about him not caring about good scripts. Everyone wanted Prometheus to succeed but for goodness sake Ridley, read the script before you start filming it.
His recent movies are crap . Napoleon doesn’t work on any level it’s just a poorly made hit piece.
I’m so glad you made this video. You touch it with a needle for me. Thank you.
The most egregious thing I ever heard Scott say was his reaction to historians criticising the accuracy of his Napoleon movie, “Well, were you there?” I didn’t know about, “Get a life,” which is far worse. History just doesn’t work the way he thinks it does. And it shows that he has an ego that is too big to accept constructive criticism.
There’s no denying that his legacy contains some of the greatest contributions to cinema ever, and if he never made another movie, he would remain one of the greats, inarguably, up there with Ford, Wells, Hitchcock, DePalma, Capra, Bigelow, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Leone, Carpenter, and the rest, as a director who not only made ground breaking movies, but who shaped the future of cinema and set out a path for so many other greats to follow.
But he’s also a curmudgeonly old fart who seems uninterested in his legacy, or even in the art form itself, which has been something of a shock to me. I don’t know if it’s just him being super defensive and prickly in his old age, or if this has always been his philosophy? But he doesn’t seem to get that the public’s pushback at these (nowadays) increasingly regular outbursts are going to damage that all important bottom line. At least, it seems all important when you hear him talk about it.
When I first heard a film critic interviewing Scott and asking him about some of the plotting flaws in Prometheus, (careful not to call them flaws but just asking questions about Scott’s choices) Scott’s only answer was that the film, “made a lot of money. We were in profit by the end of the first week after its release.”
It’s such a shame and a reminder of that famous adage, “You should never meet your heroes.” As a lover of history, if I were ever to meet the great man, I would feel compelled to question some of his choices and I imagine I would get short shrift, or perhaps a quick balance sheet breakdown, followed by a, “shrifting.”
I honestly thought he was more of an artist than he is. Or, more of an artist than he wishes to portray himself as?
Couldn't agree more about your observations regarding his inability to discern a good script from a bad one. It's such a waste to make a beautiful film with sh1tty characters, poorly written dialogue etc. I actively avoid his films these days, whilst living with the knowledge that he made two of my all time favourites. It's not easy to reconcile, but that's how it is.
You've nailed everything else with your criticisms. Thank goodness he didn't have much to do with Blade Runner 2.
I agree with this, but you are a little unfair saying he could direct The Martian in his sleep. That is a great film, and his skill and technical proficiency is in full display there.
Well, he kinda said he could direct The Martian in his sleep himself during its press tour at the time.
The Martian is extremely overrated
@@captainronlives haha- good point
Scott started going downhill when he made Prometheus a part of the Alien franchise.
he should've retired in the 90s
Nah
I liked Prometheus, in part because I never saw it heavily marketed as an Alien movie. But obviously the dialogue and the characters were terrible, despite the great actors. _Alien_ was all about the great characters and dialogue.
@@Banana_Split_Cream_Buns Prometheus would have been considered a very good movie if it wasn’t part of the Alien franchise.
@@bulldogsbob No. It was stupid even as a standalone.
The part where I abandoned any shred of hope was when the archeologist was evidently crushed with disappointment when they arrived at the destination planet. Why? They were flying over the sprawling ruins of an alien civilization! Wow! Horizon-to-horizon hard proof of intelligent alien life existing beyond our solar system. The Big Question, "are we alone" definitively answered once and for all! An entire planet's worth of exploration and treasures and wonders laid out before him, enough to excite generations of archeologists and spur the imaginations of everybody on Earth!
But no.., he was disappointed. Huh? HUH?? Why? Because he wanted to shake hands with an alien or something. That was a very, very weird, childish reaction, completely out of keeping with what you'd expect any normal, rational person, especially one claiming to be a scientist, to have.
And that was just one tiny example. There were tons of similar moments, glimpses into broken minds.
That movie was literally insane.
To be fair, he has an entire town of people working for him to the point that he rarely leaves the comfort of his own Video Village.
Time is the main issue. He has become Roy Batty
This. And well put.
👏🏽
IVE SEEN THINGS YOU PEOPLE WOULDNT BELIEVE!
I really enjoy Ridley Scott’s films, including his latest. May the movie studios continue supporting his efforts, until he can’t.
This is a valid criticism and one I noticed when he made Someone to Watch Over Me. After Alien & Blade Runner I was expecting something great, instead it was an ordinary story over-decorated.
Really takes the Martin Scorsese quote to heart, "I have to get the next one going. There is no more time left for me."
Like a lot of elderly who live well past retirement but refuse to quit. That they become their craft. You see it in people who suffer from Parkinson's or Alzheimer's even when they loss their memory and speech abilities, play a familiar tune and play that instrument as flawless as they did a half century ago.
He is a workaholic and can't stop. But it's no longer a labour of love.
Even if the big budgets dry up, he can still make small budget movies for the rest of his life!
On a tangential note, I just saw the Trump biopic, "The Apprentice". Leaving aside what you may think of the subject matter, it was superbly acted, shot, and edited. And it cost $16 million! The budgets of some modern movies are CRIMINAL.
You have to keep going when you're creative, even smaller projects to keep your skills up. If I wasn't working on small projects and editing I'd go insane
Cineranker, Scott is no longer an auteur; studios like him becuase he comes in under budget and on time. You want him to be Fincher or Nolan, but he isnt that.
This. Money matters are first, artistic concerns are secondary ... at best.
"You want him to be Fincher or Nolan, but he isnt that." Thank God for that, since those two are terrible and overrated. You´re clearly a clueless millennial.
@@MrCarpen7er Lol. Everybody else is wrong about Fincher and Nolan but you are right.
Nolan isnt an auteur either. He makes big budget blockbusters hes similar scott and micheal bay.
@@MrCarpen7er After his first botched film, Fincher has yet to make a terrible film. Most of them have, in fact, been masterful. Ridley Scott directed Exodus. And Legend. And Black Rain. And Prometheus. And Someone to Watch Over Me… Do I need to go on? There are others, as you’re no doubt aware.
Napoleon was appalling. I know a lot about Napoleon but my dad knew very little about him. I asked my dad after we watched it; “do you know now after watching that why Napoleon was a genius?”, and he didn’t. Surely Napoleon being a genius would have been a better story than some boring love story?
nappie was a bully who got most of his men killed and starved the rest to death, certainly no genius even us little brits kicked his butt
Ridley Scot needs to leave Ancient Rome alone. Has no respect for history. Just wants to make money off it.
he gave robin hood an australian accent and his merrie men an irish accent...stupid film
@@spudspuddy I mainly remember those wooden versions of Normandy landing craft from Robin Hood, silly stuff.
The biggest misconception about Ridley I often see is that his movies are as good as their scripts. That's simply not true if you take a look at scripts and production of his 3 best films. Alien had an average script elevated by final rewrites by Giler/Hill, Giger's design, actors, big budget and Ridley's direction, it could've easily been a 5/10 with the same script and much lower budget. Blade Runner had plenty of really bad drafts, early version of the monologue was embarrassing, the movie was elevated by on-set rewrites, Ridley's execution, Vangelis and actors. Gladiator had a bad script and both Russell and Ridley were very vocal about that, they changed the script a lot while filming it to make it work. The bottom line is Ridley is great when he cares, he cares when he faces many production problems and is forced to be more involved, he can make a great film off not very good script when he doesn't think about his mortality, not surrounded by yes men and constantly challenged with production problems. Unfortunately that Ridley is gone, his age did its thing, now he shits out product without nearly the same care he put years ago.
Blade Runner makes no sense people like it for the visuals and Deckard. The sequel e has a better script.
There was about 4 minutes of Ridley Scott glazing before you got to the criticism but I approve.
After seeing Alien, I thought Ridley Scott must be the best director in the world. Then I went to see Aliens...
Alien is better.
All are entitled to their choices but Alien is a far better film. Though, as I said- it's a matter of choices. I like the gothic, cold, cerebral horror more than the action and the relationship aspect of the sequel. I also loved the acting in the original- all the characters look and speak like real people, whereas with Cameron's film they clearly felt "filmy" especially the marines.
I actually love both, even Alien³, but to me Aliens is the GOAT, every single scene works on its own, not a single boring moment, everything is perfectly connected, dialogue clear, music perfect (only where needed). Of course as Canadian, I may be biased towards Cameron too ☺️
He's become a product of turning all his best works into franchises. Greed makes fools of a lot of talented people.
Exactly what I said about Gladiator II...felt like it was written by AI. Not saying it was...just that it was "by the numbers" with no actual emotional involvement.
It was alright. I didn't feel I'd wasted my money.
was it as bad as avatar 2 which sank without a trace
@@spudspuddy I didn't feel I wasted my money on the cinema ticket but I didn't want to rush back either.
Ive come to appreciate Tony Scott more as the years go by, very consistent work, True Romance is one of my favourite movies. For Ridley i love his early work but it feels like he hit his peak with Gladiator and has been declining ever since with the exception of The Martian i dont think id rewatch any of his newer movies.
Most legendary filmmakers have lost their Mojo.
Look not only at Scott, but also Lucas, Spielberg, Fincher.
Everybody loses their Mojo in old age.
And...what about the next generation of directors?
Mathieson is the cinematographer, not the editor. But I totally agree with your reasoning
He should retire. ASAP. He’s ruining his legacy.
I think at this point Ridley really does love making movies but he is probably just collecting checks for his family to live on. I respect the hustle
I don't think it's because of the money.
@@platinum11110 what else explains the output. These films are definitely not artistic statements. Nothing wrong making money for doing something you love doing. His wife, children and children's children will live well for the work he is doing
@@BubblegumCrash332 I don't blame him, I blame big Hollywood studios who rejected so many new, talented directors, yet this fossil still getting massive budgets every year to do whatever he wants. He was good once, long time ago, but not that good. Certainly not today.
@@BubblegumCrash332 I worked on industrial placement at Cadburys when I was a photography student at the then Bournville School of Art in the early 1980s. The darkroom technician spent most of his time printing boring pictures of bars of chocolate. It was typical bread and butter stuff, not great art, but it payed the bills and kept a roof over his head.
This is spot on. As a writer myself, it drives me crazy that he doesn’t spend more time with the script. He seems to only care about the spectacle and nothing at all about the story or characters. A good story takes a long time to develop. The way these big budget films are slapped together is just criminal.
I have come to realise that the best things in the Scott's movies that I like are: cinematography, music and acting. It is never him. Gladiator II is awful btw.
He signed his soul away to the beast. This is a humiliation ritual.
He is an old fart who doesn’t care!
Salutations from Belfast Northern Ireland 🇬🇧
😂
Agree
Old man Scott is getting those fat paycheques regardless...most of us will have to live on our little pensions.
Thanks for articulating what I've thought for many years now about Ridley Scott. He has two spots in my top ten movies ever so he still holds my immense gratitude whatever he decides to do.
The thumbnail you chose makes him look a bit like Father Jack Hackett from Father Ted
Jack's long lost Geordie cousin: The Mad Reverend Scott
@fincorrigan7139 Feck'n arse!!
A Director can't tell an Actor their job, or vice versa.
Ridley Scott is a great admirer of Stan Kubrick (probably one of the reasons he did ALIEN) as he used Kubrick's...2001 SPACE ODYSSEY style there & look how well that turned out, he said on one film commentry that once his Actor's were cast, it left him free to consentrate on the technical aspects, this approach hasnt failed him
Ridley Scott films excel when the script is excellent I agree. Anything less than that his films are always entertaining and way above average. He is not an average film maker he's a visual genius. So if you think that film making is keeping him alive why would you want to stop him? "Mainly full of stinkers?" Come on man what are you on about?" Doesn't know what made his great films great?" Have you ever listened to a Ridley Scott directors commentary?
He certainly doesn't understand what made the original Gladiator good, or else he wouldn't have made a terrible copy of it for a sequel. And he's made a lot more bad or mediocre films than good films. He really hasn't made a genuinely good film since the first Gladiator. He made his best films in the late 70's/early 80's, and is decades past his prime. Time to retire.
He is going to convince me that brother Tony is (was) better than Ridley
Well, he is a director, not a writer. He is usually handed scripts by studios to directed and he can choose to say yes or no. He wants to keep things friendly and professional because it is good for business, so he usually says yes because it is good for business. That is a common occurrence in the industry. ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER were scripts he was handed that he had no hand in the creation of. He liked them and he was happy to film them. The problem with many of his films is that he isn't handed scripts that aren't very good. That is a problem that exists across the industry. A lack of good scripts to produce. We need better screenplays. It is an industry problem. Which is not Ripley Scott's fault.
A good director has some feel for how good a script is, even if he isn't the writer.
The producers had control during Alien. With Blade Runner Scott tried very hard to ruin Hampton Fancher’s original script. The famous “tears in the rain” speech is authored by Rutger Hauer and isn’t even in David Peoples or Hampton Fancher’s script.
@@NickLaslett I worked on Blade Runner as a writer. And you don't know what you are talking about. The "tears in the rain" speech was in the original script.
@@rickdesper depends on what you think "a good director" means
no excuse.
He knows that the moment he retires he dies.
@CineRant You sound like Terrance Stamp with a headcold (great lead for a side gig...Serious compliment👏👏👏)
Stamp, top actor
I finally had to give up on Scott when he caved to investors and removed an entire subplot from Gladiator 2 because it centered on a character played by a Palestinian actress. There's a lot to unpack in that decision, but on a purely creative level, it betrayed that Scott no longer fought for his own artistic vision and is just a company man.
I think the only one of Scott’s films I’ve ever really loved is Alien. I have enjoyed films like The Martian and Thelma & Louise, but the rest of his work I’ve seen are kind of… meh. I didn’t like Blade Runner or Gladiator very much (generally shot well, good performances, just kind of boring) and the more comes out about Scott’s own comments on things like History have kind of deadened me towards him. I don’t need Historical films to be completely accurate but maybe don’t yell at Historians when they make their comments, tell them to “Get a life.”
Also, blaming “millennials” for the failure of The Last Duel?
“I think the only one of Scott’s films I’ve ever really loved is Blade Runner. I have enjoyed films like The Martian and Thelma & Louise, but the rest of his work I’ve seen are kind of… meh. I didn’t like Blade Runner or Gladiator very much”
So did you like blade runner or is it bad? You just contradicted yourself.
@ shoot, I meant to say I’ve only ever loved Alien.
I find that Ridley and Tony were yin and yang. Whereas Ridley has the vision for grandeur and massive sets, Tony was the man to make omelets without eggs. For Ridley its all about the vision, Russell Crowe tells as much when speaking about Gladiator, Tony was about not only the action itself, but the build up of the characters about to engage in said action.
On the other hand, i believe that Ridley has tried to recreate the same formula of Gladiator over and over again. Films like Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus feel like deviations from the original Gladiator, with same tropes. Other than that, one tends to forget that he did The Duellists, Thelma and Louise and Black Hawk Down, where it hit the spot just right. And then he has A Good Year which is for me the best sunday afternoon film, because of its so laid back atittude.
(except alien and gladiator)He makes Good movies...
...but they are ALL SHORT OF GREAT
I hate admit this but maybe QT was right in this case with Ridley: some directors should stop at a certain age or past their creative prime. Ridley is efficient but the soul isn't present in his films anymore. Or was the soul gone long ago or never was there?
Just a heads up: At 12:02 you mention John Mathieson as Scott’s editor on “Gladiator II”. However, “Gladiator II” was edited by Sam Restivo and Claire Simpson. John Mathieson was the cinematographer.
Someone should have stopped him since 1984
No.
@ legends is bad (even if it’s not Ridley’s worst movie and that I like it as a guilty pleasure)
Thank you.
I love Gladiator and like Black Rain a lot. But to be honest he only has two great films, Alien and Blade Runner.
Thelma and Louise is good no?
That Robin Hood movie was so bad I pretty much gave up on him at that point. I haven't seen most of his movies since then.
Talented people eventually get senile just like anyone else. Kubrick's last movie (Eyes Wide Shut) is just sort of a weird dream that doesn't really have a point or make sense, and that's about what I hear people saying about Megalopolis, too. It happens.
Ridley Scott is the Brett Favre of filmmakers.
Bravo.
At this point he like Peyton Manning in his last season with the Broncos
A great deep dive into Scotts film work...
Subscribed.
I think the problem with Ridley Scott is that many of his films, with the exception of Gladiator, Blade Runner, and Alien, are decent, but not great. There’s usually something missing in the writing, which he does not excel at. However, compared to most of the Marvel trash that we get nowadays, Scott’s films are masterpieces. Because we get epic period films so rarely, I’m willing to be more forgiving than I would be in other genres. I’m just glad these kind of films are being made.
I'd disagree he had a lot of great films Blackhawk Down, American Gangster, The Martian, and Thelma and Louise.
Then there's films like Black Rain and White Squall which aren't great but damn good.
Also Marvel films with a few exceptions are pretty fun.
He has only 5 writing credits and they are all short films. So if a writer on Prometheus was good enough he would have made a note about Davids accent, that is why he doesn't care about this type of details, he is 100% visual story teller
@ When I say writing, I don’t just mean the act itself. I mean working with other writers to develop a story. Scott is only as good as the material he’s given.
Yes they are made and flop hard and make the studio lose money.
"It seems to be a process without vision." Absolutely. That multi-camera 'just choose the best one in editing' style is proof that he's treating movies as a fungible product to be churned out as quickly and efficiently as possible, at the cost of art, vision or soul. He's become the modern day Roger Corman lol. Is this just the curse of old age, or has modern cynicism destroyed another good creator? I really don't know.
Many of these questions about his decision-making echo those of George Lucas. Once a director surrounds themselves with yes people, they lose sight of what made their work great in the first place. Alien and Blade Runner were visionary films, but I lost interest in Scott after Legend, which was just disastrous I couldn't take him seriously any more. Lately, the statements I've read about him online make me loathe him. He's just lost. Your analysis really proved to me that my instincts were correct. Thanks.
Lucas has only directed three movies since the first Star Wars (1977), the dreadfully underwhelming prequels. He's basically been just a producer since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Really not doing the same thing as Ridley Scott.
What was wrong with Legend? The only problem I saw was the thin story.
The problem with almost all of Scott's recent films is that they are bad. Aside from that...
Not technically, of course. But it's obvious he wants to say something, but has no idea what it is.
I'm convinced that Ridley Scott had his movies made by his brother Tony.
you nailed it. I am very disappointed by his recent works. I am glad that he didn't direct Blade Runner 2049, because Scott tends to pi$$ all over his legacy lately with stupid pre- and sequels or other mediocre movies. His interviews are also unwatchable these days,
They need to Stop signing Ridley out of the Assisted Living Center… He’s Tired…
As in life you're effected by all the scars and baggage that you accumulate over the years. Pour all your heart and soul and as much time as you can afford into planning and shooting your film and then watch it flop. Feel it tear your guts out. There's only so many times you can put yourself in that position. Then contrast that with how audiences might latch onto something you filmed as a compromise on the day because something you had your heart set on shooting just wasn't working. Pretty soon you come to the conclusion that the answer is just to shoot and not let yourself get so invested. Just enjoy the process (and make sure to get plenty of coverage while you're at it so you have more options in the edit) because at the end of the day there's really no telling what will work.
Ridley Scott is a legend. At 86, loves his job and continues to do it. Speculate all you want, rant all you want. When you have Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Thelma and Louise in your resume a legacy is the proof. Are you not entertained?
Seriously - whining about his work is so disrespectful - wtf do these people want from this man, just leave him alone.
I only like his movies when he doesn't give them new stupid colors, which means I'll watch them only on older DVDs.
@@Tinadonn 100% the internet is toxic af
@@LarryFleetwood8675 Agreed. Modernization sucks.
It's not unusual for directors to lose the magic touch as they get old. It's happened with Eastwood too.
His bad films still tend to be better than many others. Gladiator II eas watchable
I couldn't care. I respect him for being 90 and doing what he loves.
Ridley Scott is a force of nature, that's for sure. And you hit upon a good point. He feels that he's staying two steps ahead of mortality if he's always knee-deep in at least one project/film.
Prometheus is my favorite Scott movie. I don't know why people have it so much. Yes, the characters might be stupid, but aren't all humans? Wrapped up in their egos.
Could not disagree more, my friend. Prometheus was THE movie when I literally thought.....Ridley finally 'jumped the shark'. It has been downhill ever since. Sad. Please note that I still madly respect Mr. Scott. That will never change.
Prometheus is a flawed but still good film.
Excellent themes, fantastic production values (it looked great) good performances.
The story was a bit all over the place, less so than Covenant but John Logan is generally a great writer.
@@RealRoknRollr3108 Scott’s real mistake on Prometheus was hiring the ULTIMATE HACK for a writer….Damon Lindolof. The minute I read that I realized the movie was doomed and poor Ridley had too many ‘yes’ men around.
Are you high? that film is absolute dogsh*t despite looking good and having a cast of absolutely superb actors whom I usually love in their other roles. The script is the usual brain damaged 12 year old garbage hollywood has been ruining all its films with for decades now. CGI and a script written by someone with the emotions and intellect of a teenager do not a good film make. Films that are like watching someone else play playstation are not films.
He completely lost me at Blade Runner: the final cut. A total wasted opportunity to amplify one of the best movies ever made (IMHO). 25 years and he gives us a slightly shorter repeat of the director's cut, a spoilt child version where he finally gets his way, where he got to say what everyone else had originally told him was a stupid idea, that is that Deckard is a replicant. Predicatable and cliched even back in 1982. When you actually look at all the discarded scenes, you see that they added nothing to the original. Yeah, sure, he got rid of that clunky voice over; but, there was so much from the book that he could have worked in, but didn't. More and more, to me, Blade Runner looks like a movie that was saved in the editing by someone who knew what makes a good story.
As for Prometheus, he lost me in the opening titles when we learned that we were not going to LV426! Talk about a bait and switch scam!
Also, I realised that he must have so little confidence in the audiences' intelligence. Why did he (or the studios) feel the need to explain his movies at the beginning with pointless opening crawls. In BR final cut, why did he still leave that pointless piece of info in? He really must have thought we were stupid.
in PKD's book "Decard" is arrested and told he is an "andy" (android)
but he realises they a fake cops, kills them, and escapes.
why this was not in the movie, I dunno. What a scene!
watch the BR workprint if you can. It shows Deckard actually detecting!
@@bobrew461 Would really have taken the original to another level. BR 2049 also didn't think to include this scene, which, for me was another wasted op.
@@dennisearle
BR 2049 was terrible.
Villeneuve is over-rated. He makes films which should be exciting, boring; Arrival, etc. Why the BR had to be some lonely lame idiot with a hologram GF escapes me. Why not just show the guy chasing some replicants, maybe getting his butt kicked along the way? Nope, it had to be high-brow. And look what they did to poor Gaffe! Don't get me started on the indestructable Fembot, that walked into a Police HQ and murdered the Chief, then just walked out!
Some people actually think it's better than the original.
:-0
@@bobrew461 "...Some people actually think it's better than the original." What were they watching? Very baffling!
Harrison Ford's film noir-ish voiceover makes the movie for me, always has.
While Ford, himself, is on the record as not really liking the narration, he is also on the record saying he did the best he could with it (debunking the bizarre rumor that he tried to sabotage it with a poor effort).
Everything you said is true of other people like Lucas.
And these guys have plenty of money and recognition. Feels like their ego is making it very very hard for them to simply bow out gracefully, and make room for someone younger, sharper and most importantly, hungrier for creativity.
But Disney destroyed Star Wars for good. Disney destroys everything that's good theese days
He's trying to make grandiose or prestige-topic films without the necessary effort. Not even Kubrick with all his research dared to make a Napoleon film, and Scott thinks he can pull it off so easily?
I knew he went insane when he vandalized the DVD one of his greatest films, Bladerunner.