I think Alien and Blade Runner were flukes
After those, everything he made was at best woefully average, and at worst, complete crap like Prometheus.
Never trust a black man named "Chip."
Agreed, and even though I think he made a handful of solid/enjoyable films after that, he's not a director I care much about.
However...
Coppola allegedly once told his friend Georges Lucas -after the modest success of his films following Apocalypse Now- something to the effect of "At least I directed The Godfather I and II, I don't have to worry about my reputation for another 10 years or so...". To which Lucas allegedly replied: "No. The artistic reputation of the man who directed The Godfather is safe for a hundred years."
Now, I'm loathe to mention Scott in the same sentence as Coppola, but Alien and Blade Runner are two monumental masterpieces with a huge influence on cinema and arts, and while neither is as perfect a film as the first Godfather (Alien comes close though..), I think Scott will always be the guy who directed Alien and Blade Runner, and as such "doesn't have to worry either for a hundred years".
Gladiator and Thelma and Louise are better movies than blade runner
shareAlthough I quite enjoyed Gladiator in its time and Thelma & Louise is a nice-little-film-why-not?, neither have had the aesthetic significance of Blade Runner or Alien, the profound influence on representations of dystopian future or sci-ci they exerted for the 40 years after they came out, or are as frequently screened in cinemas outside of Ridley Scott retrospectives.
Saying one prefers Gladiator, Thelma & Louise or any other Scott film over Alien or Blade Runner doesn't require any justification (question of taste, I suppose), but saying they are better films requires a modicum of argumentation.
We're listening.
Okay, I’ll bite…. Blade runner’s production design, yeah great, but the script and characters are shit. The themes are half-baked. Thelma and Louise has an actual story to tell, as does Gladiator. A film is nothing without a good screenplay. Everything about Blade Runner’s window dressing is fancy, but it’s absolutely soulless.
shareThanks for playing, Mr. Socksss!
I agree: Blade Runner's script is indeed somewhat problematic. A lot is unclear or doesn't make a whole lot of sense on close examination. As for the characters, they definitely defy audience identification, although I find them quite fascinating: Deckard, admittedly is quite opaque and impenetrable, but a young woman who just learnt she's not human, her memories are not hers and she's only got a few years left to live? A genius fallen-angel with the emotional development of a young child on a crusade to literally meet his maker?
About Blade Runner being soulless: in a way, your observation is spot on.
Blade Runner is indeed about a world where synthetic humanoids are "more human than humans", and humanity as lost its soul in a decrepit and decadent world. But that's no to say the film itself is soulless (no more than Taxi Driver is a racist film because it's main protagonist is himself quite obviously racist). Blade Runner is quite incredibly rich and poetic, both visually and in almost all of the lines of dialogue Roy Batty utters.
Where we strongly disagree is about films being nothing without a good screenplay. I think cinema starts precisely where the screenplay ends. Screenplay is literature. Actor performance is theatre. Cinema is a visual medium, and besides visual composition (which you also find in photography and painting), the only purely cinematic device that you don't find in other art forms is editing. You get so much more from watching a good film than you do from reading its screenplay.
As Martin Scorsese said, "I'm not interested in what a film is about, I'm interested in how it's about what it's about".
But, yes, the magnificence of a film like Blade Runner is rarely apparent on first viewing though. You have to be in the right mood to be receptive to it, soak it in, watch it several times.