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“... Ridley Scott says his new film, Prometheus, is not a prequel to his 1979 Alien. It just has ‘certain strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak’. Fans of the first movie and its recurring avatars have been worried about this, and anxious to prove him wrong. This is easy to do in a narrow sense. The dates are right, the human story of Prometheus beginning in 2089 and ending in 2094 (Alien is set in 2122); the same sinister corporation is funding an expedition to a far planet, interested more in plunder than in the meaning of life; and our last glimpse of action in this distant place involves the birth of a slippery wriggling monster, half-snake and three-quarters octopus, from the stomach of a doomed humanoid ...”

“... Ridley Scott is always a director to watch. This proposition includes watching for things to avoid, especially when he goes for history and costume, as in 1492 and The Kingdom of Heaven. But there were also The Duellists and Thelma and Louise; and Blade Runner, it seems, is always showing up in a new version ...”

“... that there were no Martians to invade or be invaded by? The time setting of the story told by Ridley Scott’s The Martian is scrupulously unmentioned in the film or in the Andy Weir book it is based on, but nerdy fans have figured it out from internal evidence centring on the astral timing of Thanksgiving. It is 2035. Weir has confirmed that this is ...”

“... The date​ of the story in Ridley Scott’s new alien movie is 2104, ten years after the messy, murderous events that put an end to the previous prequel, Prometheus (2012). True to the tradition of the franchise, virtually the whole crew of a spaceship is wiped out in both films. Alien (1979) ended with Sigourney Weaver’s voice saying into the ship’s log: ‘This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off ...”

“... Batty has spared, is also a replicant has fuelled thousands of discussions, and has the backing of Ridley Scott, the director of the first film. But that was not what the initially released version suggested, and if the second film seems to settle the matter categorically, we can still wonder whether this decision counts outside the second film’s ...”

“... helped create an appetite for new design styles. In 1973, before his success in Hollywood, Ridley Scott directed his famous television commercial for Hovis, featuring a boy delivering bread by bicycle up a steep, cobbled street of chocolate box cottages – perhaps the most expert encapsulation and commodification of the era’s rural ...”

“... on him weeks after the rest of their friends had ditched him. Alex loved Black Hawk Down – the Ridley Scott film about the Battle of Mogadishu – and showed it to his girlfriend to explain why he wanted to be a Ranger. The other reason was that his and Ben’s grandfather, Sergeant Al Blum Sr, a New York Jew, had landed in Normandy just after D-Day ...”

“... to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a ...”

“... Much of​ Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels like an unintended essay on the art of cinema. The good bits, and there are quite a few, make up a silent film with some noise. The terrible bits are over-simplified soap opera, where people talk and are supposed to have feelings. Critics and scholars have complained about ‘historical inaccuracies’, but the most interesting deviations from fact are not that ...”

“... grandfather, a serious Liberal politician – the first Duke of Westminster. According to George Ridley, Bend’Or’s long-time employee and friend and eventually his estate agent and the executor of his will, Hugh Lupus was a major philanthropist, model landlord and altogether perfect duke. His son, Bend’Or’s father, died in Bend’Or’s infancy; the ...”

“... Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got back to him. Albrecht’s boss fretted about the cost. Nobody had spent $2.7 million per ...”

“... finished Supergun were finally seized by Customs at Teesport, James was surprised to hear Nicholas Ridley, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, tell the House of Commons that the Government knew nothing about the Supergun contract – given that he had reported it seven months earlier. James reckons that what he calls ‘the cabal’ knew all about ...”

“... the casebook Storming the Reality Studio, and a growing number of academic studies like Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity. Bukatman pays extensive tribute to Gibson’s seminal role as he charts cyberpunk’s roots in European comics, Ridley Scott’s film Bladerunner and the new wave fiction of Ballard ...”

“... were, and how devoted to the language of passive suffering – even the bouncy Alpinist Frances Ridley Havergal, who ‘stands apart from the other women hymn-writers of the 19th century, if only because of her good health’. When the dog collar was first introduced, it was considered Romish, but it gradually spread until it became the uniform even of ...”

“... tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the egg production in this country is, sadly, now infected with salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David ...”