I don't like Ridley Scott. He acts like he has a spine and he has not.
In the 80s he read one bad critique of one of his movies by Pauline Kael (the excellent analysis
Baby, The Rain Must Fall) and decided to literally NEVER READ A REVIEW EVER AGAIN. It was the start of Coward Scott.
In recent days, he decided to move away from Alien with Prometheus, to propose a fresh story in the same universe, and in the end he chickened out, keeping the Deacon which was clearly useless to the story and painting it dark blue to have a more Alien-like monster, and reverting from the Aliened Fifield to a shitty zombie, so in the end instead of a movie about Engineers and interesting bioweapons we have a movie with zombies and pseudoaliens.
Then with Covenant, he literally said "They want Aliens? I'll give them Aliens" and proceeded to make a film with Aliens as
tools and canon fodder, because Covenant is like this, the beasts are dangerous but also easy to kill and literal tools to David's will. He also made his movie a celebration of ethnocentric aesthetics and rape culture.
Not to mention the guy allowed Giger to be kicked out of the production of Prometheus (by the decor designer if I remember right), way to be grateful towards an elderly and weakened man who was one of his greatest collaborators and the creator of the legendary monster and biomechanical imagery in the first place. This was the last straw in a history of Hollywood people treating Giger like shit.
But that doesn't surprise anyone coming from a man who also said, about the whitewashing of Exodus, "I can't mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I'm just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn't even come up."
Ridley Scott probably isn't a "evil" or "stupid" guy. However, he is a coward joyfully complying with studio decisions. Gone since decades is the man who imposed Giger, now he's Giger's backstabber. Gone since decades is the storyteller with multiple space jockey theories. Now he's the guy who says "Oh whatever, the black goo does whatever, hahaha". Gone since decades is the guy who cared about anything in ethics, politics or aesthetics.
So yeah. f**k Ridley Scott.
