8 Ridley Scott Movies Where Everything Goes Horribly Wrong, Ranked

Published Oct 12, 2026, 2:30 PM EDT Sky Blanton is a Movie Contributor at ScreenRant with professional experience covering movies, television, and pop culture. Her published work spans news, interviews, features, and opinion pieces, with a focus on film, franchise storytelling, and the entertainment industry. She earned her bachelor's degree in Communications with a concentration in Professional Writing and a minor in Business Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. In Ridley Scott’s The Martian, Mark Watney's attempt to survive on Mars depends on growing potatoes, only for an airlock failure to destroy his crops. Watching him solve one impossible problem makes the next disaster even harder to take. He’s done the calculations, put in the work, and finally has food growing where nothing should grow. Then the airlock blows, killing the plants and leaving him with too little food to last until rescue. After watching him figure out how to grow potatoes on Mars, it hurts to see him lose them so quickly. Watney’s disaster is especially frustrating because he’s worked so hard to prevent it. Across Ridley Scott's science fiction and fantasy movies, other characters make it harder to feel sorry for them. They ignore advice, trust the wrong person, or commit money they can’t afford to lose. Once things go wrong, it’s hard to look away when they’re about to make another decision as bad as the first. These eight movies are ranked by how badly the original plan goes wrong and how hard it is to stop watching the consequences. The order also considers whether the characters make matters worse when they try to recover. Sometimes, watching one person realize how badly they’ve misjudged things is enough to beat a movie full of explosions. 8 Matchstick Men (2003) Via MovieStillsDB Roy Waller can talk a stranger out of their money, but he doesn’t recognize a con when the person running it calls him Dad. Angela’s arrival gives the anxious, compulsively tidy grifter someone to care about. Nicolas Cage makes his affection painfully convincing, especially as Roy lets her disrupt routines he can barely tolerate anyone else touching. When she wants to learn his trade, he starts teaching her. Finding out Angela was hired to play his daughter makes Roy’s affection for her painful to revisit. Angela isn’t his daughter, and Roy’s partner, Frank, has been using her to get his savings. After Roy believes she’s shot their latest target, he’s more concerned with protecting her than protecting himself. The staged hospital stay finishes the job. He hands over the information Frank needs because he thinks his daughter is in trouble. Matchstick Men earns eighth place by making Roy’s attempt to be a father the reason he loses his savings. He’s used to being the one who knows what’s really happening, so watching him proudly teach Angela tricks while she’s fooling him is especially satisfying on a rewatch. He thinks he’s found someone he can trust with his money and his secrets. Frank knows that’s exactly why Roy wouldn’t see the theft coming. 7 Black Rain (1989) Nick Conklin and Charlie Vincent have already caught Sato when they agree to escort him to Japan. After watching him kill two men in a New York restaurant, handing him over to the Osaka police should finish the job. But the men who collect him at the airport are Sato’s accomplices in police uniforms. By the time the real officers arrive, Nick and Charlie have helped their prisoner escape. Nick refuses to leave Osaka after losing Sato, but staying means following orders from the local police. That doesn’t come easily to Michael Douglas’s detective, who keeps arguing with Matsumoto over how to conduct the search. Losing the prisoner is humiliating enough. Then Sato traps Charlie in a parking garage and kills him, leaving Nick watching through a barrier he can’t get past. Andy Garcia’s Charlie can even get the reserved Matsumoto to sing karaoke with him, which makes his death hard to take. The prisoner they were supposed to hand over has escaped and killed Nick’s partner. Watching Nick finally accept Matsumoto’s help gives their pursuit of Sato a satisfying turn. His determination hasn’t been enough to catch Sato, and now he has to trust the detective he’s spent so much time arguing with. 6 Body Of Lies (2008) To lure Al-Saleem out of hiding, CIA agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his boss, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), give him a rival to worry about. They stage a terrorist attack and plant evidence crediting Omar Sadiki, an architect who knows nothing about it. The hope is that Al-Saleem will want to contact the man apparently competing with him. Sadiki gets no say in becoming their bait. Al-Saleem’s men find Sadiki, but questioning him exposes the trick and gets him killed. Ferris has kept Hani Salaam, his Jordanian intelligence contact, in the dark about the operation. Hani’s condition for helping him was simple. Don’t lie. When Ferris believes Aisha, the nurse he’s been seeing, has been kidnapped, he has to ask Hani for help and admit he broke that agreement. Hoffman’s surveillance looks reassuring until a few vehicles kick up enough dust to hide where Ferris is going. That’s all it takes to leave him watching a screen with no idea where his agent has gone. Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio's performances in Body of Lies make Hoffman's confidence pretty irritating when Ferris is the one risking his life on the ground, so seeing him lose track of his agent is both satisfying and frightening. Ferris has trusted the cameras to keep him safe after lying to Hani, whose contacts might actually get him out alive. 5 White Squall (1996) The teenagers aboard the Albatross have signed up to spend their school year at sea, but Captain Christopher Sheldon (Jeff Bridges) puts them to work between lessons. They have to climb the rigging, handle the sails, and trust each other enough to keep the ship running. The early mishaps give them plenty to learn, and watching the boys become friends makes it easy to want this trip to work out for them. When the squall hits, the boys can barely stay on deck, let alone carry out Sheldon’s orders. The ship rolls onto its side, and water floods the cabins before everyone can escape. The worst moment is Sheldon finding Alice trapped behind glass. Watching him try to reach her is unbearable after spending so much of the voyage trusting him to know what to do. He’s close enough to see his wife, but he still can’t save her. The hearing is frustrating to watch after seeing Sheldon try to save Alice. He’s being asked to defend his handling of the ship when he couldn’t even get his own wife out. Then the boys stand up for him, and the time spent watching them struggle through his lessons pays off. They'd lost friends on that voyage, but they still wanted the people judging their captain to understand why they trusted him. 4 House Of Gucci (2021) Patrizia Reggiani wants Maurizio to claim his share of the Gucci business, even though he initially gives up the family’s money to marry her. Lady Gaga makes it easy to see how much Patrizia enjoys being welcomed back into their world by Uncle Aldo. Soon, though, Aldo’s generosity isn’t enough. She wants Maurizio making the decisions, and pushing his uncle and cousin Paolo aside looks like the way to get him there. Paolo wants someone in the family to believe he can design clothes, and Patrizia and Maurizio use that to get him to expose Aldo’s tax evasion. Then they had Paolo’s fashion show shut down for using the Gucci name. Jared Leto’s portrayal of Paolo Gucci in House of Gucci makes his wounded pride hard to ignore, and it's difficult to enjoy the betrayal without feeling a little sorry for him. He’s helped send his father to prison, expecting a chance to prove himself, and his cousins won’t even let him finish the show. Patrizia gets Maurizio to stop letting his relatives run his life, then discovers he wants her out of it, too. That’s what makes their breakup worth watching beyond the arguments. She’s helped remove the people standing between him and the company, only to find herself being dismissed next. Even Maurizio can’t hold on to Gucci. He sells his stake, and the real-life scandal behind House of Gucci culminates in his murder and Patrizia's conviction. All that scheming leaves neither of them with the future they wanted. 3 The Counselor (2013) Brad Pitt’s Westray gives the Counselor enough reasons to walk away from the drug deal before any money changes hands. Michael Fassbender plays him as a lawyer who hears the warnings but still thinks he can take a share of the profits and enjoy married life with Laura (Penélope Cruz). The engagement diamond he chooses for her makes it harder to watch him go ahead. He’s put so much thought into what he wants to give her and far too little into what this deal could cost her. Then the shipment disappears, and bailing out a client’s son suddenly looks like evidence against him. The son was a cartel courier, killed so the thieves could steal the drugs. The Counselor had no part in the theft, but the connection is enough to put him in danger. Watching him turn to Westray for help is frustrating because Westray already told him this could happen. Now he wants a way out of the deal he wouldn’t walk away from. The Counselor takes third because even the man who understood the danger can’t escape it. Westray gets to London, only to die by the device Reiner described earlier. Knowing what it does makes watching it tighten around his neck especially horrible. Then there’s Fassbender on the phone to Jefe, still hoping he can negotiate Laura’s release. It’s hard not to listen for an opening along with him, but Jefe offers none. The lawyer who expected a payout ends up alone with a disc he can’t bear to watch. 2 Black Hawk Down (2001) The soldiers heading into Mogadishu expect to capture two of Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s lieutenants and return to base before the day is over. Helicopters will deliver the assault teams, Rangers will secure the surrounding streets, and a convoy will take everyone out. Watching them prepare is uncomfortable when even the decision to leave night vision equipment behind assumes they won’t need it. The first helicopter crash turns the operation into a rescue mission, and Black Hawk Down’s depiction of the extraction mission and Delta Force teamwork has earned praise from a military expert. Soldiers head toward the wreck instead of returning to base. Then a second Black Hawk is shot down, leaving another crew to rescue while men are still fighting to reach the first. Watching the convoy miss a turn is maddening when wounded soldiers are waiting for it just streets away. The rescue convoy should finally give everyone a way out, but there isn’t room for all the soldiers to ride. Some had to run behind the armored vehicles, still exposed to gunfire after surviving the night. That last stretch is what makes the failed raid so hard to shake. They’ve spent hours reaching wounded men and holding positions, and now even keeping up with their ride home takes everything they have left. 1 Prometheus (2012) Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway read the same star pattern in several ancient cultures as an invitation to meet humanity’s creators. They arrive expecting answers about life, then find a severed head and a pile of Engineer corpses. It’s hard to share Holloway’s eagerness to explore when something has clearly killed the beings they’ve come so far to meet. David secretly doses Holloway’s drink with the alien substance, while Millburn reaches toward a snake-like creature that everyone watching knows he should leave alone. It’s tempting to shout at the screen, but Shaw’s ordeal makes the crew’s mistakes harder to laugh at. Noomi Rapace is convincing as she programs a surgical machine to cut the organism out of her abdomen. Even with the lid closed, there’s barely any distance between her and the thing she’s trying to escape. The ending of Prometheus and its connections to Alien become important when Weyland approaches the Engineer expecting more years of life and gets killed instead. David, so composed while experimenting on the crew, has his head torn off. Then Janek has to ram the Engineer’s ship to stop its deadly cargo reaching Earth, making it an astonishingly bad return on Weyland’s investment. His search for immortality nearly gets everyone back home killed, and the crew has to destroy its own ride home to prevent it. Release Date June 8, 2012 Runtime 124 minutes Director Ridley Scott