Every Ridley Scott Sci-Fi Movie, Ranked

Image via 20th Century Studios Published Aug 28, 2026, 7:57 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Ridley Scott keeps on making movies, and there will be a time when that statement ages and appears incorrect, as everyone’s mortal, but that time when it becomes “Ridley Scott kept on making movies…” who knows, at this point. It doesn’t feel like anytime soon, which is mostly surprising to say because Scott’s 88 years old, at the time of writing. He made his feature-length directorial debut relatively late, compared to other filmmakers, as he turned 40 the year The Duellists came out. That film also set the stage in terms of defining the sort of movie for which Ridley Scott would become best known for making: historical dramas/epics. See also Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut of which is actually very good), and The Last Duel. Also, movies like American Gangster and Black Hawk Down were technically historical, albeit not ones that went back as far in time (a matter of decades, rather than centuries). Then again, there’s an argument to be made that science fiction is actually the genre with which Ridley Scott is most associated and best known for. His first sci-fi film came out just a couple of years after The Duellists (his second overall), and was a classic. The same goes for his second sci-fi movie, which was his third film overall. The others he’s done are a little less revered, but also more recent, so time might well be kind to them… or at least one of them. Maybe. Anyway, there are half a dozen science fiction movies Ridley Scott’s directed, and they're ranked below. Honestly, five of them are at least pretty good, so that’s a good track record. But five is not six, and so one of them is thereby not so good. Speaking of… 6 'The Dog Stars' (2026) Image via 20th Century Studios That not-so-great Ridley Scott sci-fi movie is the director’s most recent, The Dog Stars, so it kind of unfortunately ends a bit of a winning streak he’d had with the genre up until that point. Before The Dog Stars, the worst thing you could say about a Ridley Scott movie (and probably only one Ridley Scott sci-fi movie) was that it was divisive. It’s hard to imagine The Dog Stars inspiring enough passion among at least a few people for it to qualify as divisive. It is a movie where very little of interest happens, outside a couple of admittedly striking action sequences, and one scene near the end that temporarily throws an otherwise lifeless narrative into bizarre territory (very temporarily, since it comes and goes as a single set piece lasting less than 10 minutes). There isn't a reason to watch this, especially if you’ve seen anything post-apocalyptic in nature in the last decade or so. It’s sort of a post-apocalyptic hangout movie (probably not intentionally) for much of its runtime, with Jacob Elordi sleepily hanging out with a dog, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley. There are occasional bursts of action and that one weird part near the end, which can be spoiled, and is one of the only things that can be spoiled. Those moments of almost-excitement and/or bafflement stop The Dog Stars from being utterly sleep-inducing, with it ultimately being mostly nap-inducing. There isn't a reason to watch this, especially if you’ve seen anything post-apocalyptic in nature in the last decade or so, since so much of The Dog Stars feels overly familiar alongside kind of boring; a real deadly combination. 5 'The Martian' (2015) Image via 20th Century Studios A fair few people would probably consider The Martian better than this ranking implies, but at the same time, everything Ridley Scott’s done in the science fiction genre before The Dog Stars is good to great, or at the very least, some kind of interesting. The Martian is probably the least interesting, though, of those five movies. It’s a cleaner and more consistent film than the two sci-fi movies it’s positioned between within Scott’s filmography, though maybe it’s just a bit too safe to stay genuinely interesting for the entirety of its runtime. It’s going for a crowd-pleaser kind of thing, in its defense, and sure, its success on that front that makes it a difficult movie to outright dislike or imagine too many people disliking. You’ve got a familiar plot here about a man trying to survive and then get home, with the novel thing here being he’s stuck on Mars. The less novel thing is that he’s played by Matt Damon, and that guy’s always trying to get home. It’s good entertainment in the end, and sometimes fun, albeit not always funny in the way that infamous Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy might lead you to believe. 4 'Alien: Covenant' (2017) Image via 20th Century Studios The controversy continues, putting Alien: Covenant above The Martian. This is admittedly not a popular opinion, and this was the previously alluded to divisive sci-fi movie by Ridley Scott. But the critical thing is that it didn’t do too poorly, critically. More critics dug it than The Dog Stars, so this being “as bad as things got” for Scott’s forays into the science fiction genre really wasn’t too bad. On a narrative front, this goes to slightly less interesting territory than Ridley Scott’s other Alien prequel (more on that in a bit), leaning into the Alien thing a lot more, and having a xenomorph causing eventual havoc. Everything with Michael Fassbender’s more interesting, though, and that’s the main way this does work as a sequel to Scott’s other prequel. One more installment is probably needed before things line up nice and neatly with the first Alien movie (which Scott also directed… and so more on that one in a bit, too), so even if Alien: Covenant isn't loved by everyone, it would be nice if it was ultimately the second part of an eventual trilogy. Time will tell. For now, Alien: Covenant is cool and people are too mean to it. It’s got some fun schlocky moments, it looks great, and Fassbender getting to play two androids for the price of one elevates things considerably. 3 'Prometheus' (2012) Image via 20th Century Studios Prometheus is the other Alien prequel Ridley Scott directed, and it’s better and more well-realized overall than Alien: Covenant, all the while being a good deal riskier, too. It tackles some big ideas without leaning too far into expected territory for an Alien movie. If you're after xenomorphs, or even just one xenomorph, you're going to be disappointed, seeing as Prometheus goes in a different direction in terms of antagonists (and there isn't as much conflict as you might expect, at least for a good chunk of the runtime). There’s a focus here on solving an eternal mystery and exploring a new planet for a while before things shift toward survival horror territory. The sense of it going against what you'd expect out of an Alien prequel is honestly refreshing, and the risks taken here pay off more often than they don’t. Prometheus is a really strong – and admirably ambitious – sci-fi movie that’s due for a critical re-evaluation, if it hasn’t gotten one already. It still looks and feels phenomenal, and offers more narratively and thematically than some give it credit for. 2 'Alien' (1979) To keep on going with the Alien films, here’s the first, which was also the first of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi efforts (and, as mentioned before, his second feature film overall). The premise of this one’s also super simple, and it hits all those beats you're probably familiar with, but in any event, the deal is that there are a few people on a spacecraft, and then on that spacecraft, there’s also (eventually) an alien. And the people onboard have to fight to stay alive, even though they're very much outmatched by a creature that proves to be the ultimate killing machine. Parts of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant elaborate on why the xenomorph is so fearsome, though that’s not really important to this movie. This movie’s just about surviving, and the simplicity here is great, because it largely succeeds in doing for aliens what Jaws did for sharks. Well, okay, it’s not as sub-genre-defining as Jaws, since The Thing is about as equally great, as far as survival horror movies about aliens are concerned, but still, Alien very much earns the right to have a title as broad as Alien. It would be almost any other director’s best sci-fi movie, were it in their filmography, but with Scott, you’ve got one other genre-defining effort that’s possibly even greater. 1 'Blade Runner' (1982) Image via Warner Bros. The other untouchable movie is, of course, Blade Runner. Ridley Scott directed this only a few years on from Alien, and it’s remarkable how consistently strong his first three movies were, overall. Blade Runner is based on/inspired by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, not being a direct adaptation yet still having the same basic premise and lots of shared themes. The story here is technically simple, since things focus on a bounty hunter (of sorts) in the future who’s tasked with taking out numerous rogue replicants, but things go deeper than that in other ways. Blade Runner succeeds most of all as an exercise in world-building, because few other sci-fi movies either before or since have proven quite as immersive. It’s a phenomenal looking and sounding film, and then everything it explores thematically makes Blade Runner more engaging than the otherwise simple narrative might have you anticipate. It’s a classic for good reason, or, more accurately, for lots of good reasons, and it stands as the greatest sci-fi film Ridley Scott has ever directed.