When Ridley Scott goes small: 7 movies that reveal another side of the master of spectacle

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred There are, broadly speaking, two Ridley Scotts.There’s Big Ridley, the visionary filmmaker of large-scale epics who has spent nearly 50 years creating some of the most indelible worlds in modern movies.He’s the Ridley who unleashed a xenomorph aboard the Nostromo in “Alien” (1979), conjured the dystopian Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” (1982), resurrected ancient Rome in “Gladiator” (2000) and plunged American soldiers into the chaos of Mogadishu in “Black Hawk Down” (2001).

Big Ridley commands armies of extras, builds enormous sets and deploys cutting-edge visual effects to create places that no longer exist — or never did.His movies have grossed roughly $5 billion worldwide.Then there’s Small Ridley.Small Ridley is the director who brings the volume down and puts the people front and center.

Sometimes that means a genuinely smaller movie.Other times the canvas can still be enormous; what’s small is the intimate story Scott chooses to tell within it.That often-less-heralded side of Scott has been there from his first feature, 1977’s “The Duellists,” which sets an obsessive two-man feud against the sweep of the Napoleonic Wars.

Scott’s latest film, “The Dog Stars,” in theaters Aug.28, is set after a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity.

That might sound like Big Ridley territory but the movie, adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, keeps its focus on a small band of survivors, including a pilot (Jacob Elordi) living at an abandoned airport with a heavily armed survivalist (Josh Brolin).With almost everyone else gone, the story comes down to people trying to figure out how to live with one another at the end of the world.

At 88, Scott is still cranking out movies with little apparent interest in slowing down.This fall, the academy will give him an honorary Oscar and he’s got plenty of Big Ridley on deck, including a pirate movie starring Hugh Ja...