Digging through Ridley Scott’s mid-1990s work, and films such as 1492, White Squall and G I Jane struggled to break through.
After exploring the American landscape through the trauma of exploited women riding up against male toxicity, Ridley Scott clearly found himself tapping into American psychology and culture to an even greater degree than his earlier movies, as depicted in his mid-ish 1990s films.
1492: Conquest Of Paradise sees Scott tackle the founding myth of America’s discovery by the western world, telling the legendary tale of Christopher Columbus and his voyage, to mark the 500th anniversary in 1992.
White Squall, four years later, has Scott remain on the open sea, tackling Charles H Gieg’s memoir of a collegiate group of college boys in the early 1960s forged by a season of naval training. Scott moves from the discovery of America to the self-discovery of the American man, both framed by the wide ocean.
The period between Thelma & Louise and Gladiator, the majority of the 1990s, arguably serves as Scott’s fallow period. The three films he makes across the rest of what retrospectively now stands as a truly remarkable decade of popular and artistic cinema sees him fall way behind his peers, in quality control and box office success.
Despite his near Oscar success with Thelma & Louise, had he not bounced back with Russell Crowe’s defiance of the Roman Empire with Gladiator, Scott could well have faded into obscurity after 1492, White Squall and G. I. Jane, all of which pale in comparison to his earlier and later work.
His focus begins to diversify. He begins executive producing projects, including a little known comedy called Monkey Trouble by Franco Amurri (then husband of his Thelma & Louise star Susan Sarandon), and Mike Figgis’ adaptation of Terrance Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, with his old The Duellists player Albert Finney. He had remained directing prominent commercials while making films, including a famed Apple Mackintosh ad in 1984 and several for the Chanel brand into the 1990s.
And in 1995, he formed with brother Tony (by then a successful director of blockbusters thanks to Days Of Thunder and The Last Boy Scout) a production company called Scott Free, which from White Squall onwards would produce all of his projects in-house.
The Scotts themselves would resolve to become as much of a brand as many of the films they made. As part of this expansion, the same year they bought a controlling interest in Shepperton Studios, which eventually combined into the even better known Pinewood, but displayed their ambition to keep the British film industry alive and current.
1492: Conquest Of Paradise
Before this, Ridley would suffer the disappointment, critically and commercially, of 1492.
It should have been a slam dunk. The voyage of Columbus is one of the formative tales about modern civilisation we learn as children. The discovery of America, a nation Scott had by the early 1990s taken to heart as much as his native country. A tale of empires, tragedy, colonial power, new lands and ‘alien’ people. It had all of the elements of the kind of blockbuster Scott would later deliver in Gladiator. It even had the weight of that half-millennial anniversary, with Columbus ‘fever’ across the world.
So how did it end up faring worse at the box office than Carry On Columbus? Undoubtedly, various factors.
It came just two months after the rival film that year, which was barely more coherent and less comedic than the aforementioned Carry On. Christopher Columbus: The Discovery was a patently ridiculous, swashbuckling approach to the Columbus voyage, casting the Italian explorer as a handsome, dashing pirate, Captain Blood-style.
Director John Glen seems to have thought he could make a period James Bond movie after a decade helming that franchise. In comparison, Scott’s grand canvas and sombre approach was Citizen Kane, yet it was enough to confuse audiences at the time. Presumably nobody wanted to stomach a second Columbus film after the stench of the first. If you want more details on both, do check out my recent episode on it and 1492 on my podcast At the Movies in the 90s.
At any rate, audiences didn’t respond to 1492 as critics struggled with the historical inaccuracy behind Scott’s portrayal, an issue that has troubled the majority of his films set in ages past (mostly recently Napoleon, which has sent Scott on numerous quite comical tirades).
An impressive international cast including Gerard Depardieu as Columbus (who I found almost impossible to connect with thanks to his thick French brogue drowning out dialogue), Frank Langella, Mark Margolis, even Sigourney Weaver (returning to a Scott film for the first time since Alien) as powerful Queen Isabella, did little to change perceptions of a long, often quite languid picture that spans decades and at points feels it’s taking as long to watch.
Yet it often looks sumptuous, with Scott displaying the visual skill witnessed in his earliest films, which his more recent grounded projects simply hadn’t afforded him the opportunity to really pull off. One sequence sees Columbus and his crew sail through heavy clouds which part to reveal the verdant lands of the Americas for the first time, and it likely would have taken your breath away on the big screen.
With a memorable Vangelis score underpinning proceedings, 1492 should have carried us along with the ship across the seas, filling us with the wonder of a New World discovered by Columbus and his crew. Sadly, it simply doesn’t.
A great deal of the problems lie in a rather inert script from Roselyne Bosch, a French journalist who in researching Spain’s plans for celebrating the Columbus anniversary became fascinated by the man, and concerned about retroactive attempts to paint his discovery in a tainted light.
As she told the Los Angeles Times: “For a long time there was the cliche of the hero, and now I’m afraid there is the cliche of genocide. The truth is in between. He was not Cortes, he was an explorer. He imposed his view once he got here, but to blame him for the massacres that followed is like blaming Christ for the Inquisition.”
She was encouraged by friends to pen a script and was backed by French film producer Alain Goldman, who brought it to Scott’s attention at the point he was making Thelma & Louise. Funding took off as the timing of the Columbus anniversary spurred studios into seeing box office potential that, ultimately, failed to pan out.
Scott shoots to banish any memories of Fredric March’s 1949 portrayal of Columbus in Christopher Columbus, humanising and contextualising a flawed avatar of western imperial colonialism, but something becomes lost along the way. The intent is not matched by dramatic impetus. 1492 fails to ever truly come alive as a thrilling spectacle. Scott is no documentarian. He is a showman. And the show underwhelms this time around.
White Squall
Perhaps Ridley Scott had a sense of this. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t release another film for four years, the biggest interregnum of his career. Perhaps that is why he remained on the open seas for his next film, White Squall, released in 1996.
Based on Gieg’s memoir, The Last Voyage Of The Albatross, adapted by screenwriter Todd Robinson, Scott’s film moves from the late 15th century to the mid-20th. It transposes the action from the founding of America to an exploration of how modern American man is forged in adversity and comradeship.
Gieg, as played by Scott Wolf (a dead ringer for Tom Cruise in so many ways here), joins the crew of the brigantine Albatross, all of them high schoolers under rigorous ‘skipper’ Christopher Sheldon (Jeff Bridges). Over the course of a formative summer, Sheldon works to turn the assorted group of boys into men as they learn to sail. They forge friendships, battle the elements and ultimately face terrible tragedy.
Scott was drawn to the underlying collegiate themes in the story, as he told Film Threat: “It touched me… it’s about a time in the past that will not return, which is to a degree the last vestiges of innocence, if you like. It’s an earnest film and well-meaning, and rather moral. I like the fact that, to summarise the original story, it’s about the rite of passage, which I think has evaporated today. So I felt that was worth refreshing in people’s minds that this did exist. Also the fact that it was a good system.”
You can sense the working class boy in comments like this rising to the surface. Though he grew up in a very different environment, the themes he appreciates here are universal. He will return to male fraternity more than once as a theme in his later films.
He also wasn’t convinced that he would end up back on the open seas after 1492 so soon. though.
“In 1492, because we were against the gun with the budget and the time, we never got rough seas,” Scott said. “So I never really experienced rough seas, and besides, that was kind of all right for the story of Columbus because he basically took nine weeks to cross the Atlantic and the worst experience he had was the Sargasso Sea, the weeds. I think he had a bad storm on the way back but by then he’d certainly been on the islands. So there was a kind of frustration, I’d never really hit high seas and I wanted to romanticise that journey a little bit with rough water.”
Though White Squall isn’t among Scott’s finest films, it resoundingly improves on 1492, precisely because it invests the central narrative with an emotional core that his Columbus biopic lacked. The crew of the Albatross certainly fit traditional archetypes – the jock, the entitled rich boy, the anxiety-ridden suicidal kid, and so on. Scott plays those beats in fairly formulaic fashion, but White Squall’s early 60s earnestness makes up for that. A charm exists at the heart of Wolf and Bridges’ performances especially, both forced to carry the weight of a final act narrative right turn that is a touch… unexpected.
One of the more striking recent discoveries about White Squall is the film being an unlikely inspiration for the American Q-Anon conspiracy movement.
Gieg and the Albatross crew frequently repeat a fraternal saying “where we go one, we go all”, written by Robinson in his screenplay. This has become the rallying cry of an extremist conspiracy cult, built around the mysterious Reddit poster Q, who are believed to have had a sizeable impact on the right-wing voter base behind the Donald Trump Presidency and the January 5th attack on Capitol Hill.
Robinson abhors the connection, as he told the Los Angeles Times, claiming Q followers had “entirely misunderstood and abused the actual point. I would prefer to have my words kept in the context they were created for. Imposing unintended meaning on art, in this case, has been hurtful, and is untrue. White Squall is a story about initiation, growth and companionship. It was never intended to be political or divisive.”
It’s likely Scott would be equally horrified that his rite of passage film, filled with intense, raging storm sequences at sea and a triumph over adversity core, has been weaponised by the far right.
White Squall, like 1492, is nonetheless both about America’s foundational myths, just on completely different scales. They are examples of a director looking in on a nation, attempting to understand who they are and where they came from. It was a journey audiences weren’t prepared to take with him (White Squall also underperformed at the box office). It displays Scott’s eternal, artful curiosity about worlds and people he wishes to understand.
He wouldn’t be done with this voyage either, as his almost forgotten final film in the 1990s would attest.
G. I. Jane
G. I. Jane in theory should have been a box office success, rather than Scott’s third commercial dud in a row, and one which garnered more scathing criticism than either of his two previous films.
Demi Moore, emerging from the peak of her 90s superstardom after hits including Ghost, Indecent Proposal and Disclosure had cemented her persona as one of Hollywood’s most potent female leads, brought David Twohy’s script directly to Scott. She believed in the story of Naval lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, drafted into an all-male team of Navy SEALS as a gimmick by Anne Bancroft’s crafty US Senator, only to prove herself as a feminine equal in a beefed up, all male environment.
It should have been Scott’s next step from the gender politics of Thelma & Louise and its exploration of toxic masculinity.
Moore’s officer faces institutional sexism and the near-sadistic Master Chief (Viggo Mortensen), who constantly tries to prove Jordan as a woman cannot cut it opposite his men, before seeing and realising her worth.
Bancroft is the villain, calculated in weaponising Jordan’s femininity as a media play for her own political ends, thwarted as Moore’s character proves her mettle and forges fraternal bonds with the males who previously would have discounted her based on gender. In a world 25 years on where women in military roles is much more accepted, G. I. Jane in theory looks ahead to a more progressive world.
It just smacks of Scott far from the top of his game, his camera speaking more to Michael Bay’s mode of gung-ho military hardware obsession than the precision of, say, Stanley Kubrick.
G. I. Jane is never as obnoxious, noisy or narratively inept – indeed it has more to recommend it than many critics or certainly audiences gave it credit for. Moore, for one, gives a truly committed performance, one she was unfairly maligned and even nominated for a Razzie Award over. Twohy believes he knows why, as he told Yahoo: “Striptease came out while we were in production, and the stink was in the air. I don’t think it was fairly received, and Striptease had a lot to do with it, because it was a truly bad movie. She should have been nominated for G.I. Jane, and I think she would have been, too, if not for Striptease. That tainted her chances and maybe everyone’s chances.”
Arguably, this triumvirate of 1990s films sit at the bottom of Scott’s filmography, representing the artist unable to channel his gifts in the manner that made him such a celebrated director at the end of the 1970s.
It was a crossroads for him – an exploration of American gender, masculinity and obsession that had, by 1997, more than ran its course. Scott recognised this, and resolved to throw himself headlong, as the decade came to an end, into making films faster and with more brio, as he told the Guardian.
“For the first 10 years of my career, I used to spend too much time waiting or developing or being too critical about what I would take on next, and at the end of the day it’s a movie, it’s not a cure for cancer. So I learnt to lighten up.”
That’s exactly what he did. He would begin the 2000s with a bang by asking a simple question… are you not entertained?
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