Will ‘The Counselor’ help Ridley Scott bounce back from ‘Prometheus’?

When movie trailers trot out the term "visionary director," they're referring to filmmakers like Ridley Scott. With "Alien," "Blade Runner," "Thelma & Louise," "Gladiator," "Black Hawk Down," "Prometheus," and numerous other films, the 75-year-old Englishman has produced some of the most indelible and striking movie moments of the past four decades.

People who go to see films by Scott are probably not there for the snappy dialogue or expertly assembled plot. Those things are nice -- and sure, sometimes they're present -- but at the end of the day, they're seeing a Scott movie for the cinematic spectacle.

For Scott, who began his directing career in advertising, visuals are everything. That's not to say that the director doesn't care about a movie's script or that his scripts aren't good, but only that the screenplay tends be a secondary concern for him. Nowhere was that more evident than in the Scott's most recent film, "Prometheus." A prequel to 1979's "Alien," the sci-fi epic was absolutely gorgeous to look at thanks to impressive locations, stunning visual effects, and top-notch production design. But it was a bit of a let down in almost every other way -- particularly the widely-criticized screenplay by Damon Lindelof.

It seems that Scott took the hint. His latest movie "The Counselor" (starring Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, and Brad Pitt) features an original screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy. The author of books like "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road," McCarthy is no stranger to Hollywood, but this is the first time he's written something from scratch for a motion picture. By combining McCarthy's script with "The Counselor's" ridiculous A-list cast, Scott may have found the perfect vehicle to bounce back from "Prometheus."

When it comes to Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror film "Alien," the script wasn't what made it such a classic. It was those dark, claustrophobic, steam-filled corridors aboard the doomed ship Nostromo. And while the director's cult classic "Blade Runner" is filled with quotable lines (many of which were improvised anyway), what sticks with viewers the most about the open-ended sci-fi film are the incredible cyberpunk cityscapes of Los Angeles in the year 2019. Nobody saw "Gladiator" for the dialogue; they saw it for the thrilling and brutal arena battles. And "Black Hawk Down"? Scott's action-packed war movie was so stripped of substantive dialogue that it might as well have been a silent movie!

But while Scott's memorable work has earned him three Oscar nominations for Best Director, he's never actually won. Increasingly, his style-over-substance approach to filmmaking has come to bite him in the butt with critical flops like "Prometheus" and "Robin Hood." His films have always delivered in terms of the visuals, but script problems have prevented many of his movies from being truly great. With McCarthy's screenplay contribution to "The Counselor," Scott might have made something that fires on all cylinders for the first time in a long time.

"The Counselor" hits theatres on Oct. 25.