Scott: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)

Poised on the brink of a globalised world, early 90s cinema saw a resurgence of interest in the horizon, discovering a new kind of synthetic pantheism and syncretic paganism at the furthest extremities of the screen. While Waterworld may have taken that widescreen moment to its extreme, in a film consisting of almost nothing but horizons, 1492: Conquest of Paradise perhaps provided its single greatest personification, in the form of Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) – or Ridley Scott’s Christopher Columbus, celebrated and canonised here as the first truly global citizen, the first explorer to truly apprehend the horizon in all its sublime curvature, and the first person to think in both Eastern and Western hemispheres at once. That might sound historically simplistic, but 1492 is less a period piece than a perceptual experiment, an attempt to see whether Scott can set his eye on the horizon as steadily as Columbus might have done, keeping it consistently in his sights while never losing sight of the diplomatic vision needed to envisage it as a truly multicultural, pluralistic threshold. That’s even more of a feat in that Roselyne Bosch’s screenplay is largely preoccupied with Columbus the colonist-governor rather than Columbus the sailor-explorer, with the result that the horizon becomes a state of mind more than anything else, a quasi-mystical mode of apprehension that ensures that even the most constrained close-ups feel as if they’re shot in staggering widescreen, not unlike the various chamber dramas in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur. In the short sequences when we are actually at sea, Scott seems to distill every possible permutation of light and water in a few shots, fading dusk and dawn into a luminous, numinous ether, while Columbus’ treatises on the quadrant give the whole film an astronomical scope, really making you grasp just how much a journey like this was the equivalent of outer space travel in our own time. Combined with Vangelis' most monumental, ceremonial score to date, that makes for something like Scott's strongest sci-fi film since Blade Runner – the Tyrell Corporation remade as Queen Isabella's court – in which even the quietest, most sheltered moments aim for nothing less than to be the widest widescreen film of all time, the last port of call before cinema spills out into the surrogate horizons of IMAX rides and amusement park adaptations.