Critical Responses

• "Directors tend to emphasize different issues in their interpretations of scripts. For a director such as Ridley Scott, masculinity and its habitual need to prove itself is a presence even in his films about women (Thelma and Louise and GI Jane). The value that prevails in a Scott film is the positive value of masculinity."  - Ken Dancyger 
• "Though Scott has forged a style that is recognizably his own, his approach to filmmaking has a precedent in German Expressionist filmmaking. The Expressionists were among the first to use the elements of mise-en-scène (set design, lighting, props, costuming) to suggest traits of character or enhance meaning. Similarly, Scott's techniques are stunning yet highly artificial, a trait often criticized by American reviewers, who too often value plot and character over visual style, and realism over symbolism." - Susan Doll
• "Although the films Ridley Scott chooses to make suggest a director of considerable ambition, he is unlikely to be taken very seriously until he overcomes an inability to tell a story clearly or to create credible, vivid characters. Too concerned with the look of things, his work is often predictable, even incoherent." - Geoff Andrew
• "Often derided by critics for his tendency to emphasise style over substance, particularly in the use of inexplicable, though atmospheric, light sources (a quality he shares with his brother Tony), Scott has created a vision of the past, present and, most dramatically, the future, that has influenced a whole generation of film-makers." - Ian Haydn Smith
• "Scott is a decorator, a borrower, and a synthesist; like a great machine he contains all striking images and can deliver and fuse them, so long as the product is impersonal… He is a as blithe and versatile as Michael Curtiz, who always made hokum look as good as quality. Scott can find his imagery in 1800 or 1492, in the Dark Ages or the darker future of twenty-first century L.A." - David Thompson
• "If his decorative pictorial style can produce breathtaking images, on a bad day Ridley Scott is also capable of virtually a parody of the over-designed advertising aesthetic, such as the blossom-strewn fantasy Legend (1985), which at times resembles a commercial for toilet paper." - Ronald Bergan 
• "People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at." - Ridley Scott