Tag Archives: Ridley Scott

Prometheus (2012)

Playing witness to a long-standing director’s career can be fascinating, especially when said director enters his twilight years. While few of them would ever admit to it, any artist who has found an enduring critical success must eventually look at his oeuvre in terms of “legacy”, measuring his work against that of his peers and cinematic kin. For Ridley Scott, this self-evaluation brought him back to the bleakly-industrial and brilliant Alien, and a desire to see that world augmented. Like any artist with an eye trained on his own mortality, Scott chose to build on his Alien world existentially, and the resulting epic is Prometheus; a film somehow both ceaselessly mesmerizing and utterly baffling.

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Blade Runner (1982)

What makes us human?” is one of those base existentialisms that we’re all a bit too cynical to actually consider.  It’s the type of query that for us to truly acknowledge the significance of, must be presented subtly and in the guise of “art.”  It is thusly that Ridley Scott‘s masterpiece Blade Runner is so successful in its theme.  Only once you have parted the curtains of a neo-noir and dystopic 2019 Los Angeles, only once you have passed through the door that is Scott’s and Douglas Trumbull’s remarkable achievement in visual effects, only once you’ve tiptoed past Vangelis’ eerily sinister neo-classical score do you arrive at the heart of this Philip K. Dick adaptation.  Blade Runner is precisely an interrogation of what it means to be human, or perhaps more specifically, what it means to question this humanity.

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