Ridley Scott is not exactly a humble man, nor should he be. This is the man whose work has defined and influenced entire generations of genres and subsequent filmmakers. He made both the original Alien and Blade Runner within a three-year span, basically single-handedly redefining what science fiction movies looked like to this day. He has every right to feel a little sure of himself, and he often does. In a recent interview, the eighty-eight-year-old filmmaker referred to his upcoming Jacob Elordi-starring film, The Dog Stars, as the “best film” he has made “since The Martian.”
The Dog Stars is a science-fiction horror thriller, adapting Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name for the big screen. Notably, this will be Scott’s seventh film since the release of The Martian back in 2015. Whereas other veteran filmmakers within Scott’s class, such as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, seem to have settled into a late-stage groove in which they make a new film every handful of years and are highly selective about what projects they take on in their twilight years, Ridley is exactly the opposite. He loves to work, as evidenced by him having released twenty films over the course of the last twenty-six years.
For some, this could very easily lead to a case of quantity over quality, but Scott has continued to hone and refine his craft over this time and continues to release routinely great work. Though occasionally divisive, critics and audiences alike would agree that recent projects such as Alien: Covenant and The Last Duel are still premium-grade Ridley Scott films. Also worth noting is that during the press tour for his previous film, Gladiator II, he famously referred to it as “the best thing I’ve ever made.”
And yet, here he is a year-and-a-half later, pulling out The Martian as a measuring stick of greatness for his modern work. Why? Well, The Martian was a gargantuan hit, financially and critically, reaching heights that none of his films since have been quite capable of scaling. Also, The Martian was thrust back into the pop-culture consensus earlier this year when Project Hail Mary (a film based on a book by the same author as The Martian, Andy Weir, which features some strong similarities) became a breakout cinematic sensation in a similar way.
Thus, using The Martian as a point of reference is a savvy marketing move for Scott, fostering broad appeal in a way that few others of his films have managed in the past decade. Will The Dog Stars actually be his best film since The Martian? Well, that remains to be seen, and if there’s one thing audiences have learned about Ridley, it’s that what he says in the lead-up to a film and what he says in its aftermath aren’t necessarily one and the same.
He’s an artist who is constantly working, constantly reinventing himself, so his opinions seem to pretty consistently be in flux about what is or isn’t work that he’s genuinely proud of. This is the same man who was ready and rearing to share Prometheus with mass audiences when it released in 2012 but was practically apologizing for it just a few years later in the lead-up to Covenant.
The Dog Stars looks solid, and given that it is a film directed by Ridley Scott, regardless of what he says about it, the chances are very high that it will be, at the very least, a pretty good movie.
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