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Director Ridley Scott told Deadline in 2023 that he’d been offered to direct superhero movies, but that it wasn’t for him, after telling them in 2021 that modern superhero movies are “no fucking good” and “boring as shit.” He said he’d already directed at least 3 superheroes: Ellen Ripley in Alien, Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, and Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator. “The difference is,” Scott said, “the f*cking stories are better.”

The case can certainly be made that Ridley Scott has brought some of the best stories to screen that we’ve ever seen, and Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator are among them, but what about his more modern fare? Are the stories for House of Gucci, The Last Duel, and Napoleon “better”? Ridley Scott hasn’t had a movie achieve both critical and commercial success since 2015’s The Martian, which begs the question: Wtf happened to Ridley Scott?...

Harvey Keitel and Matthew Guinness in The Duellists

Photo: Paramount Pictures With all the excitement surrounding Ridley Scott's upcoming film Prometheus marking the director's much anticipated return to the world of Alien, which he brought to life back in 1979, I've heard many people reference Scott's 1977 directorial debut, The Duellists. Strangely I've heard it mentioned not only because Scott has a new film coming out, but I've read it mentioned in articles discussing its accomplished cinematic swordplay. My interest was piqued and I took to Netflix. Based on Joseph Conrad's 1908 short story "The Duel" (download it for free here), which itself is based on a true story, The Duelists centers on Armand d'Hubert (Keith Carradine) and Gabriel Feraud (Harvey Keitel), a pair of officers in Napoleon's army. The film begins with Feraud in a duel with a man we'll later learn is the nephew of the Mayor of Strasbourg.

How do you pull off an historical epic film in just over an hour and a half? Ridley Scott did so in his 1977 Cannes-honored The Duellists working from screenwriter Gerald Vaughan-Hughes' adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short that deftly dashes across 58 scenes spanning 6 discreet epochs inside 16 years, all within a 96 minute movie (not counting credits). Call it "The Mini-Epic."

To help the audience keep balanced on its collective time- and location-traveling toes (every 1m45s, on the average), Scott also had the sense to employ Howard Blake for a simple yet highly effective Romantic score that acts as the film's anchor. It returns again and again from opening through closing titles to a flexible main theme varied in each usage to resonate differently with the film's diverse cast of characters and compositions. Impossibly perfect cinematography certainly didn't hurt the film's success, nor did influences from Tarkovsky, Jancso, Kobayashi, Kubrick,...