“In the future, e‑mail will make the written word a thing of the past,” declares the narration of a 1999 television commercial for Orange, the French telecom giant. “In the future, we won’t have to travel; we’ll meet on video. In the future, we won’t need to play in the wind and rain; computer games will provide all the fun we need. And in the future, man won’t need woman, and woman won’t need man.” Not in our future, the voice hastens to add, speaking for Orange’s corporate vision: a bit of irony to those of us watching here in 2025, who could be forgiven for thinking that the predictions leading up to it just about sum up the progress of the twenty-first century so far. Nor will it surprise us to learn that the spot was directed by Ridley Scott, that cinematic painter of dystopian sheen.
Bleak futures constitute just one part of Scott’s advertising portfolio. Watch above through the feature-length compilation of his commercials (assembled by the YouTube channel Shot, Drawn & Cut), and you’ll see dens of Croesan wealth, deep-sea expeditions, the trenches of the Great War, the wastes of the Australian outback, acts of Cold War espionage, a dance at a neon-lined nineteen-fifties diner, and the arrival of space aliens in small-town America — who turn out just to be stopping by for a Pepsi.
Not that Scott is a brand loyalist: that he did a good deal of work for America’s second-biggest soda brand, some of them not just Miami Vice-themed but starring Don Johnson himself, didn’t stop him from also directing a Coca-Cola spot featuring Max Headroom. The decade was, of course, the nineteen eighties, at the beginning of which Scott made his most enduring mark as a visual stylist with Blade Runner.
A series of spots for Barclays bank (whose indictments of computerized service now seem prescient about our fast-approaching AI-“assisted” reality) hew so closely to the Blade Runner aesthetic that they might as well have been part of the same production. But of Scott’s dystopian advertisements, none are more celebrated than the Super Bowl spectacle for the Apple Macintosh in which a hammer-thrower smashes a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style dictator-on-video. The compilation also includes a less widely remembered commercial for the Macintosh’s technically innovative but commercially failed predecessor, the Apple Lisa. So associated did Scott become with cutting-edge technology that it’s easy to forget that he rose up through the advertising world of his native Britain by making big impacts, over and over, for downright quaint brands: Hovis bread, McDougall’s pastry mix, Findus frozen fish pies.
It may seem a contradiction that Scott, long practically synonymous with the large-scale Hollywood genre blockbuster, would have started out by crafting such nostalgia-suffused miniatures. And it would take an inattentive viewer indeed not to note that the man who oversaw the definitive cinematic vision of a menacing Asia-inflected urban dystopia would go on to make commercials for the Sony MiniDisc and the Nissan 300ZX. It all makes more sense if you take Scott’s artistic interests as having less to do with culture and more to do with bureaucracy, architecture, machinery, and other such systems in which humanity is contained: so natural a fit for the realm of advertising that it’s almost a surprise he’s made features at all. And indeed, he continues to do ad work, bringing movie-like grandeur to multi-minute promotions for brands like Hennessy and Turkish Airlines — each one introduced as “a Ridley Scott film.”
Related content:
See Ridley Scott’s 1973 Bread Commercial — Voted England’s Favorite Advertisement of All Time
Watch The Journey, the New Ridley Scott Short Film Teased During the Super Bowl
Ridley Scott Walks You Through His Favorite Scene from Blade Runner
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
