“Head and shoulders above the rest”: How Ridley Scott’s favourite ‘Star Wars’ movie shaped his entire career
Even though there are 11 feature-length entries in the Star Wars franchise with plenty more to come, the debate over which one can be named the best is a two-horse race, although Ridley Scott would disagree with even narrowing it down to a 50/50 conversation.
While the prequel Rogue One has plenty of supporters and is comfortably the high point of the Disney era, it still can’t hold a candle to the two that endure as the finest offerings in a galaxy far, far away. It’s a tetchy subject that has the potential to incite a riot on the internet, but did Star Wars peak with its first instalment or immediate follow-up, The Empire Strikes Back?
It’s a point for intense rumination and has been for the last 40 years. They’re not exactly independent of each other, either, which makes it a lot trickier to quantify. Not only that, but they meant completely different – but equally important – things to cinema at large, not that Scott gave it much consideration when putting the finest of points on his pick.
The opening salvo completely changed the face of the industry forever, became the highest-grossing release of all time, and won eight Academy Awards for its technical artistry. The sequel furthered the story, enhanced the mythology, delivered an earth-shaking twist, continues to be spoken of in reverential tones as perhaps the greatest second chapter ever not named The Godfather Part II, and set the template for the ‘darker and grittier’ model blockbuster IP maintains to this day.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and it can’t be argued with because it’s distinctly theirs, with Scott’s choice shaping the entirety of his career. When it was put to him that The Empire Strikes Back was the cream of the crop, the filmmaker couldn’t have been more vehement in his disagreement.
Calling the first Star Wars “head and shoulders above everything else,” Scott referred to it as “the best in the series by far”. Looking at how he carved out his own place in a cutthroat business, it doesn’t take a genius to see just how deeply the DNA of the film eventually retitled A New Hope seeped into his cinematic consciousness.
Scott’s feature-length debut, The Duellists, premiered at Cannes just three days before George Lucas’ Star Wars hit theatres in May 1977, and it can’t be a coincidence that his next two movies were both sci-fi stories. Not just any sci-fi stories, either, but two of the greatest ever made in Alien and Blade Runner.
Admittedly, it sounds reductive to say, ‘Obviously he loved Star Wars because he only went ahead and spent his next two films in the genre’, but it went far beyond that. Scott informed Esquire that part of the reason why it affected him so profoundly was because the backdrops and characters were “very tangible,” the narrative was “clear and concise,” and the visual effects were “modest” without being “show-offy”.
In microcosm, that soundbite can be applied to almost every large-scale production he’s helmed since The Duellists. Alien and Blade Runner are both relatively simple stories on a foundational level, being a haunted house in space flick and a futuristic dystopian thriller, respectively, each of which thrived from existing in worlds that felt lived-in and authentic, and the visual effects informed and enhanced the story rather than dictating them.
Scott’s best work on the biggest canvas has hewed largely to that template ever since, which can all be traced back to Star Wars. Gladiator? A revenge story at its core. The Martian? A survival tale. Thelma & Louise? Sisterhood. Black Hawk Down? The horrors of war. American Gangster? The irresistible lure of crime. The Last Duel? Jealousy.
While that’s diluting them down to the basest elements, the point still stands. They’re all expensive, mass-marketed motion pictures that thrive on a sense of scope, scale, grandeur, and virtuosity, and every single one of them espouses the core values Scott used to justify Star Wars as the pinnacle of the spacefaring saga.
