Ridley Scott has tackled a number of different movie genres over the course of his decades-long directorial career, from war (Black Hawk Down) to crime (American Gangster) to historical epic (Gladiator), but the genre he’s most associated with is science fiction. Sir Ridley has helmed some of sci-fi cinema’s most beloved classics.
His greatest achievement in the genre is timeless masterpieces of science fiction.
Blade Runner Is The Best: It Asks Big Questions
While the actual story of Blade Runner follows Rick Deckard’s investigation into the replicants that have immersed themselves in human society, the subtext asks some pretty big questions.
What exactly makes someone a person? Will industrialization ever reach a stopping point? And, of course, the movie’s biggest question: Is Deckard himself a replicant?
Alien Is A Close Second: H.R. Giger’s Designs Are Hauntingly Beautiful
Science fiction is a very visual genre, so production design is one of the most crucial elements of any sci-fi movie. The iconography of Alien ranks among the most recognizable in the history of science fiction, and fans have H.R. Giger to thank for that.
From the cold environments of the space station to the surreal emptiness of the foreign planet’s catacombs, Giger’s designs for Alien are hauntingly beautiful. And of course, Giger’s crowning achievement is the xenomorph itself, a terrifying inversion of the familiar human form.
Blade Runner Is The Best: It’s A Hard-Boiled Detective Story In A Futuristic Setting
Scott doesn’t make straight sci-fi movies. There are always elements of other genres. The Martian is a character-focused dramedy whose lead character happens to be an astronaut. And Blade Runner is a hard-boiled film noir in a futuristic setting.
While Blade Runner didn’t invent the neo-noir — that distinction goes to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown — it did help to define it, and introduced sci-fi iconography to the genre.
Alien Is A Close Second: It Brought A Horror Sensibility To Science Fiction
The great thing about Alien is that it’s a rare hybrid-genre movie that succeeds at both of its genres. Alien works beautifully as a sci-fi movie, but it’s also one of the cornerstones of horror cinema.
Under the surface of all the big ideas at play, like making with extraterrestrials and trusting artificial intelligence, Alien is a perfectly paced horror movie filled with effective suspense and scares.
Blade Runner Is The Best: It’s Open To Interpretation
Nothing in Blade Runner is exactly clear. Ridley Scott didn’t underestimate his audience’s intelligence. Instead of spoon-feeding viewers information about the plot and characters, Scott dropped breadcrumbs and left the audience to figure it out for themselves. The result is a movie that’s open to interpretation.
As soon as Blade Runner hit theaters, it became the audience’s job — not Scott’s or Ford’s or Dick’s — to determine what it all meant. Viewers have been offering interpretations of Blade Runner for decades, and they’re still no closer to a definitive answer, because it wasn’t designed to have a definitive answer.
Alien Is A Close Second: It Was Influenced By All Of Sci-Fi History
When he was asked about parallels between his Alien script and existing sci-fi works, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon joked, “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody; I stole it from everybody!”
The story was influenced by some truly great past sci-fi movies, including The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, and Planet of the Vampires.
Blade Runner Is The Best: It’s About Being Human
On some level, every great science fiction story is about humanity. If a sci-fi movie explores “the other,” then it’s only in comparison to humanity. The villains are replicants, A.I.s who became sentient, realized they were being used as slaves, and escaped into civilized society to hide in plain sight.
The replicants are demonized at the beginning of the movie, but slowly humanized as the story goes on. In particular, Roy Batty summarizes his own humanity in his breathtaking final monologue, delivered brilliantly by the late, great Rutger Hauer.
Alien Is A Close Second: It Made Space Terrifying
While 2001: A Space Odyssey a rollicking cosmic adventure, Alien portrays the vast emptiness of outer space as a prison.
It’s a terrifying place filled with terrifying dangers, inverting the usual sense of wonder that comes along with humankind’s dreams of venturing into outer space.
Blade Runner Is The Best: The Ambiguous Ending Is Thought-Provoking
The best sci-fi movies are the thought-provoking ones; those that leave audiences debating various issues on their way out of the theater. These are movies like Solaris, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Children of Men and Ex Machina.
Blade Runner is a prime example of this, ending on a delightfully ambiguous note as Deckard is left unsure if he’s a human or a replicant. The actual answer isn’t what matters; it’s the further questions that this raises about Deckard’s anti-replicant actions throughout the movie.
Alien Is A Close Second: Ellen Ripley Is The Quintessential Sci-Fi Heroine
The screenplay for Alien was written with unisex characters. It was up to the casting team to decide their gender. So, Ellen Ripley became a landmark for female representation in action cinema completely by chance.
What made the character so iconic was Sigourney Weaver’s unforgettably fierce performance in the role. She turned Ripley into the quintessential sci-fi heroine.
